Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

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

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.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.