Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

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

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

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

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.