Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

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

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.