He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.

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

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.