[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!

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

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

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.