Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

I have a strong will to love you for eternity.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Speak truth to power.

We must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

We have no idea any more what it means to feel guilty. The communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them, murdurers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent in his soul and conscience than Oedipus, and yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.

A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.

In our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener).

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30).

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.