Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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.
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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.
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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.
To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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.
Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
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.