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

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

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.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.