A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

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

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

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.

You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.

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

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical