The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

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.

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.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.