You see how wrong I go, how ridiculous I'm making myself in your eyes by keeping on guessing wrong like this! Doesn't that help you to come out with it? Come on now!

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.

... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.

... we engage in politics because we don't know anything. This is clearly revealed in the way we go about it. Our parties exist from a fear of theory. The voter fears that one idea can always be contradicted by another. Therefore the parties reciprocally defend themselves against the few old ideas they have inherited. They don't live from what they promise, but from frustrating the promises of others. This is their silent community of interests.

It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream - the life that now lay open before him.

Life is to blame for everything.