The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.