We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling – even against all reason – makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.