What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.