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

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

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.

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.