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

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.