Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

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.

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 destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

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.

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

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.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

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.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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 art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

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

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

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.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

The work of memory collapses time.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic slice of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

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

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

Music is a hobby, because I'm not making any money out of it, but I put just as much conviction into that as I do into my acting.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.