The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.