Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

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.

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.