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

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.