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.

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.