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.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

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

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.