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.- Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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 only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
