Walter Benjamin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Walter Benjamin on Wise Famous Quotes.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

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.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat ?

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

How immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists.

A real translation is transparent.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

The experience of our generation:
that capitalism will not die a natural death.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

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.

Languages are not strangers to on another.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

What has been forgotten ... is never something purely individual.

In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.

The work of memory collapses time.

Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the ...

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn
the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

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.

Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.

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.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

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.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

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

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

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

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about

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

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.

In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

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

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

The distracted person, too, can form habits.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

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.

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

History is written by the victors.

How different everything would have been if they had been victorious in life who have won victory in death.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

In the fields with which we are concerned,
knowledge comes only in flashes. The text
is the thunder rolling long afterward.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.