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

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

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

There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.