Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface . . .

The man who is thus outside the confines of every value-combination, and has become the exclusive representative of an individual value, is metaphysically an outcast, for his autonomy presupposes the resolution and disintegration of all system into its individual elements; such a man is liberated from values and from style, and can be influenced only by the irrational.

One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism.

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.