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

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.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

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