Walter Benjamin
philosopher, writer, translator, essayist, literary critic, sociologist, art critic, literary historian
Read on Wikipedia1892 – 1940
All Quotes by Walter Benjamin
“All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”
“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
“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.”
“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
“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.”
“Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the "dreams of his youth." ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.”
“The work of memory collapses time.”
“Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values—inexperienceable—which we serve.”
“I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.”
“Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.”
“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.”
“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.”
“Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. … For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form — it may be called fleeting or eternal — is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.”
“There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.”
“The true sign of decadence is not the collusion of the university and the state (something that is by no means incompatible with honest barbarity), but the theory and guarantee of academic freedom, when in reality people assume with brutal simplicity that the aim of study is to steer its disciples to a socially conceived individuality.”
“The critic does not pass judgment on the work; rather, art itself passes judgment, either by taking up the work in the medium of criticism or by rejecting it and thereby appraising it as beneath all criticism.”
“Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth—that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.”
“A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.”
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”
“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”
“Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgement Day.”
“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.”
“The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.”
“The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.”
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”
“The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.”
“Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.”
“The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”
“The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.”
“We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This did not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous empty time. For every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter.”
“Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.”
“History breaks down in images not into stories.”
“In the fields with which we are concerned knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.”
“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
“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.”