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

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

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

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

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

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.