Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

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

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.