The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.