Walter Benjamin Quotes
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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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.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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.
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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.
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In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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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.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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.
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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.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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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.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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Related Authors
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Theodor Adorno Sociologist -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Martin Heidegger Philosopher -
Franz Kafka Writer -
Roland Barthes Philosopher -
Paul Klee Painter -
Carl Schmitt Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Hannah Arendt Philosopher -
Jurgen Habermas Philosopher -
Bertolt Brecht Poet -
Jean Baudrillard Philosopher -
Herbert Marcuse Philosopher -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Gyorgy Lukacs Philosopher -
Giorgio Agamben Philosopher -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Max Horkheimer Philosopher -
Charles Baudelaire Poet -
Gilles Deleuze Philosopher