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

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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