A Quote by Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

Quote Topics

Constellations Ideas Objects Stars Translated

Quote Author

Walter Benjamin
German - Critic
July 15, 1892 - September 26, 1940

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

Rebecca Solnit

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

John Green

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

John Berger

I had the usual friends who pointed out constellations of stars. But it really was watching the stars. It was getting some sense of the motion of the earth. I found it a remarkable thing.

Vera Rubin

In the movie, the stars above the ship bear no correspondence to any constellations in a real sky. Worse yet, while the heroine bobs... we are treated to her view of this Hollywood sky-one where the stars on the right half of the scene trace the mirror image of the stars in the left half. How lazy can you get?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

John Green

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

Jack Gilbert

His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.

Elias Canetti

The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines the material objects. The Ideas are more fundamental than the objects.

Werner Heisenberg

In the realm of ideas, of mental objects, those ideas whose properties are reproducible are called mathematical objects, and the study of mental objects with reproducible properties is called mathematics.

Philip J. Davis

You are down there alone, the stars seemed to say to him. And we are up here, in our constellations, together.

Kate DiCamillo

Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.

Vladimir Lenin

He insisted that stars were people so well loved, they were traced in constellations, to live forever

Jodi Picoult

Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

As a writer I feel more like a filter than a performer. I absorb and observe and then I name scatterings of stars into constellations. I don't usually spend time asking whether the stars are random or planned. I make a narrative in the darkness, the area subscribed by an outline of bright points. Sometimes they look like Ursa Minor, and sometimes they just looks like one day the world exploded.