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.

In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.

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

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

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

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.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.