The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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.
The work of memory collapses time.
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.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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.
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 art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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.
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
