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

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.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

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.

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].