Walter Benjamin famous quotes

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

#Writing #Ideas #Delay

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

#Happiness #Being Happy #Fear

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

#Love #Friendship #Relationship

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. . . . He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand -like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery -in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Real #Past #Men

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Book #Writing #People

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

#Fruit #Understood

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Race #World #May

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

#Ruins #Realms #Allegory

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

#Memories #Passion #Borders

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Life #Morning #Lying

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Writing #Musical #Three

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

#Writing #Musical #Three

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

#Photography #Doe #Optics

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Blow

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

#Happiness #Ideas #Too Much

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

#Death #Stories #Authority

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

#Art #Epic #Dying

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

#Conviction #Leap #Strollers

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Intelligence #Interpretation #Form

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

#Dream #Eggs #Boredom

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

#Ideas #Progress #Status Quo

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Giving #Shock

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Memories #Lying #Past

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Attitude #Media #Judging

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Order #Balance #Balancing Act

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

#Lying #Vests #Dresses

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Notebook #Dream #Art

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

#Learning #Photograph #Illiterate

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Book #Order #Boredom

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

#Travel #Book #Cities

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

#Civilization #Barbarism

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Men #Alphabet #He Man

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Beautiful #Block #Past

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

#Memories #Book #Men

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

#Historical #World #Costumes

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Alive #Ownership #Intimate

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Mountain #Mice

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

#Heart #Past #Mouths

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Ignorance #Cities #Names

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

#Art #Works Of Art #Ritual

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Love #Dream #Solitary

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

#Rose #Path #Cannabis

The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Book #Treasure #Prove

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

#Book #Shelves #True Freedom

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Sight #Justice #Peculiar

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

#Our Generation #Generations #Natural

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
-- Walter Benjamin

#Inspirational #Civilization #Barbarism

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

#Philosophy #Muse #Translations

For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Men #Intellectual #May

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Art #Unique #Space

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Attitude #Mean #Giving

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

#Long #Fields #Rolling

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

#Dream #Individuality #World

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Dream #Sleep #Eggs

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Running #Home #Age

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

#Art #Men #Play

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Cities #Landscape #Rooms

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

#Dark #Owl #Extinction

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Light #Shining #Doe

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Running #Inspiration #Writing

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Rotten #Mundane Life #Privacy

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Past #Views #Abortion

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Memories #Mean #Past

The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Past #Winning #Enemy

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Emergencies #Tradition #States

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

#Thinking #Flow #Wells

The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Enormous #Mankind #Models

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

#Might #Messiah #Gates

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Fall #Taken #People

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

#Mean #Looks #Auras

A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Determination #Growth #Blind

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Literature #Great Work #Genre

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

#Criminals #Moral #Killing

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
-- Walter Benjamin

#May #Events #Fortune

The camera... on the one hand extends our comprehension of the necessities that rule our lives; on the other, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
-- Walter Benjamin

#Hands #Fields #Cameras