He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

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.

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

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

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

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.