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

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.

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.

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.