There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation. - Walter Benjamin

Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.

A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.

The critic does not pass judgment on the work; rather, art itself passes judgment, either by taking up the work in the medium of criticism or by rejecting it and thereby appraising it as beneath all criticism.