Languages are not strangers to on another.

The work of memory collapses time.

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

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.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

Knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.

Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners -- all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.

The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

History is written by the victors.