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.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

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

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

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.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.