Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

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

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.