Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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

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.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.