Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

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.

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them