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

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.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

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.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

The distracted person, too, can form habits.

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.