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

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.