I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.
Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.
A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart’s beat.
The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices.
Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.
Everything changes but the avant-garde.
A poet’s work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.
The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.