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

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

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

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

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

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.