All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate. |
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. |
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. |
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. |
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. |
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. |
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up. |
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. |
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity. |
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. |
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. |
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. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future. |
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest. |
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand --like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery --in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. |
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us. |