Top 148 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Benjamin - Page 2

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

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

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.

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.

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

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.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

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

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

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

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.

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.

Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.

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

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.

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

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

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

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

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.

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

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.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

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.

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

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

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.

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

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

Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.

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.

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

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

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.