Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

To penetrate one's being, one must go armed to the teeth.

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.

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?