Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

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

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.