Walter Benjamin Quotes

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

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

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

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

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.

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. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.

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

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

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.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

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

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

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. 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.

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

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

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

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.

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.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

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.

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

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

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

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

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

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

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

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

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

We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.