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.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.