People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

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.