Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head

While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface . . .

Kitsch is certainly not bad art, it forms its own closed system.

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves

If the embodiment of the fundamental idea of our age were to be found in Victorian architecture, in the Church of Cristo Re in Rome or the Church in Brasilia, in Moscow University or the Capitol in Washington, then our age would undoubtedly be called the 'age of kitsch.'

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism.

The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.

You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?