To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Languages are not strangers to on another.
What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.
Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions.