Top 148 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Benjamin

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.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

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

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

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

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

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.

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

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

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

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

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

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.

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

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

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

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

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.

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

The work of memory collapses time.

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

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

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

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

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.

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

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

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.