Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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

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