Walter Benjamin Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin Quotes & Sayings
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
— Walter Benjamin
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
— Walter Benjamin
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
— Walter Benjamin
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
— Walter Benjamin
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
— Walter Benjamin
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
— Walter Benjamin
As the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24
— Karen Armstrong
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
— Walter Benjamin
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
— Walter Benjamin
What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat ?
— Walter Benjamin
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library — Phillip Lopate
To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
— Walter Benjamin
Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.
— Walter Benjamin
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
— Walter Benjamin
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
— Walter Benjamin
How immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists.
— Walter Benjamin
Languages are not strangers to on another.
— Walter Benjamin
A real translation is transparent.
— Walter Benjamin
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
— Walter Benjamin
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
— Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
— Walter Benjamin
Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
— Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
— Walter Benjamin
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.
— Walter Benjamin
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.
— Walter Benjamin
Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.
— Walter Benjamin
The work of memory collapses time.
— Walter Benjamin
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
— Walter Benjamin
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
— Walter Benjamin
Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.
— Walter Benjamin
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
— Walter Benjamin
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness
— Walter Benjamin
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
— Walter Benjamin
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. — Walter Benjamin
What has been forgotten ... is never something purely individual.
— Walter Benjamin
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
— Walter Benjamin
Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.
— Walter Benjamin
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.
— Walter Benjamin
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
— Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
— Walter Benjamin
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
— Walter Benjamin
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
— Walter Benjamin
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
— Walter Benjamin
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
— Walter Benjamin
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
— Walter Benjamin
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
— Walter Benjamin
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
— Walter Benjamin
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
— Walter Benjamin
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
— Walter Benjamin
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
— Walter Benjamin
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
— Walter Benjamin
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
— Walter Benjamin
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
— Walter Benjamin
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
— Walter Benjamin
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
— Walter Benjamin
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
— Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
— Walter Benjamin
What, in the end, makes advertisements superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon says - but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.
— Walter Benjamin
There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
— Walter Benjamin
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
— Walter Benjamin
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
— Walter Benjamin
Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
— Walter Benjamin
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
— Walter Benjamin
To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.
— Walter Benjamin
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
— Walter Benjamin
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
— Walter Benjamin
What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about
— Walter Benjamin
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
— Walter Benjamin
We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
— Walter Benjamin
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
— Walter Benjamin
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
— Walter Benjamin
The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it.
— Walter Benjamin
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
— Walter Benjamin
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
— Walter Benjamin
Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin.
— Avital Ronell
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
— Walter Benjamin
All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
— Walter Benjamin
The distracted person, too, can form habits.
— Walter Benjamin
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
— Walter Benjamin
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
— Walter Benjamin
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
— Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
— Walter Benjamin
In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.
— Walter Benjamin
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
— Walter Benjamin
History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
— Laurie Anderson
Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.
— Walter Benjamin
History is written by the victors.
— Walter Benjamin
How different everything would have been if they had been victorious in life who have won victory in death.
— Walter Benjamin
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
— Walter Benjamin
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text
is the thunder rolling long afterward. — Walter Benjamin
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
— Walter Benjamin
