The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.