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.

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

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

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.