Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

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.

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.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.