If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.