Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.