Top 100 Walter Benjamin Quotes
#1. Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library
Phillip Lopate
#2. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.
Istvan Deak
#3. Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin.
Avital Ronell
#4. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
Terry Eagleton
#5. 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
#6. Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscape of the body ... These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it still more deeply into the universe of matter.
Walter Benjamin
#7. In the fields with which we are concerned,
knowledge comes only in flashes. The text
is the thunder rolling long afterward.
Walter Benjamin
#8. 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
#10. A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#11. Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness
Walter Benjamin
#13. Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners - all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.
Walter Benjamin
#14. As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
#15. He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
Walter Benjamin
#16. 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
#17. What has been forgotten ... is never something purely individual.
Walter Benjamin
#18. Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.
Walter Benjamin
#19. Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
Walter Benjamin
#20. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
#21. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Walter Benjamin
#22. In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin
#23. A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
Walter Benjamin
#24. Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
#25. Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help ...
Walter Benjamin
#26. Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
Walter Benjamin
#27. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Walter Benjamin
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Walter Benjamin
#32. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin
#33. All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin
#34. In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland's sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.
Walter Benjamin
#36. You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
Walter Benjamin
#37. Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.
Walter Benjamin
#38. We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
Walter Benjamin
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
Walter Benjamin
#42. History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.
Walter Benjamin
#43. Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Walter Benjamin
#44. O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than ... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.
Walter Benjamin
#46. To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
#47. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin
#48. I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.
Walter Isaacson
#49. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
Walter Benjamin
#50. 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
#51. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.
Walter Benjamin
#52. The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it.
Walter Benjamin
#53. You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Walter Benjamin
#54. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin
#56. 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
#57. The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
Walter Benjamin
#58. Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
#59. Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)
Walter Isaacson
#60. The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
Walter Benjamin
#61. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
Walter Benjamin
#62. Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the ...
Walter Benjamin
#63. 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
#64. Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter Benjamin
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. Freud's fundamental thought, on which these remarks are based, is formulated by the assumption that consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace.
Walter Benjamin
#69. During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
#70. Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...
Walter Benjamin
#75. I came into the world under the sign of Saturn
the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
Walter Benjamin
#76. 61I am prepared to ... assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussions in the very core of the brain.
Walter Benjamin
#77. 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
#79. Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
#80. For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - 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
#81. It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
#82. 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
#83. Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#84. 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
#85. No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
#87. Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.
Walter Benjamin
#88. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
Walter Benjamin
#89. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Walter Benjamin
#90. Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
Walter Benjamin
#91. Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.
Walter Benjamin
#92. Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
#93. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Walter Benjamin
#95. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
Walter Benjamin
#96. All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
Walter Benjamin
#97. In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
Walter Benjamin
#98. Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?
Walter Benjamin
#99. Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.
Walter Benjamin
#100. Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
Walter Benjamin
