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

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.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The truth is more important than the facts.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.

The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough.