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

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

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

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

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

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.