The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

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

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe