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

The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it.

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.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Indeed, is not the homecoming amateur with his vast number of artistic snaps more contented than the hunter, returning laden with the game which is only of value to the trader.

The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.

The book borrower… proves himself to be an in venerate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures… as by his failure to read these books.

Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions.

Freud’s fundamental thought, on which these remarks are based, is formulated by the assumption that “consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace.