A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

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

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.