We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

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

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].