No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.