Walter Benjamin Quotes
Top 97 wise famous quotes and sayings by Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Walter Benjamin on Wise Famous Quotes.
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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.
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
How immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists.
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.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.
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.
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn
the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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.
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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.
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.
What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about
We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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.
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.
In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.
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.
knowledge comes only in flashes. The text
is the thunder rolling long afterward.