Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

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.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.