Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

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

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

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