Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.