Walter Benjamin Quotes

Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way. ~ Walter Benjamin

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there. ~ Walter Benjamin

For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - 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. ~ Walter Benjamin

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin. ~ Allison Hoover Bartlett

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. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood
it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation
which these books arouse in a genuine collector. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. ~ Walter Benjamin

Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there. ~ Walter Benjamin

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity. ~ Walter Benjamin

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

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

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

History breaks down into images, not into stories. ~ Walter Benjamin

Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. ~ Walter Benjamin

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. ~ Walter Benjamin

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge. ~ Walter Benjamin

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon 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 irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ~ Walter Benjamin

Such an animal will swing indecisively from one worry to the next, giving a nip at each fear in turn, displaying the fickleness of despair. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance? ~ Walter Benjamin

Fiat ars – pereat mundus", says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of "l'art pour l'art." Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. ~ Walter Benjamin

In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective. ~ Walter Benjamin

But where the human form withdraws from photography, there for the first time display value gets the better of cultic value. And it is having set the scene for this process to occur that gives Atget, the man who captured so many deserted Parisian streets around 1900, his incomparable significance. Quite rightly it has been said of him that he recorded those streets like crime scenes. A crime scene, too, is deserted. Atget snaps clues. With Atget, photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history. ~ Walter Benjamin

The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a 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. ~ Walter Benjamin

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

[L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

Freud's fundamental thought, on which these remarks are based, is formulated by the assumption that consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

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

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization. ~ Walter Benjamin

The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

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

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. ~ Walter Benjamin

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library ~ Phillip Lopate

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

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

Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness. ~ Walter Benjamin

In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland's sadness. To that person, they remain faithful. ~ Walter Benjamin

From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. 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. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. ~ Walter Benjamin

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts. ~ Maximilien De Robespierre

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man. ~ Walter Benjamin

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. ~ Walter Benjamin

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.3 ~ Walter Benjamin

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. ~ Walter Benjamin

History is written by the victors. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close ... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write ... ~ Walter Benjamin

In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

[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! ~ Walter Benjamin

What has been forgotten ... is never something purely individual. ~ Walter Benjamin

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed. ~ Susan Sontag

You have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what's more, you also have to have left it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it. One stage further, and you seek it out, you orient your-self by it. The same thing with houses. It is only after having crept along a series of them in search of a very specific one that you come to learn what they contain. From the arches of gates, on the frames of house doors, in letters of varying size, black, blue, yellow, red, in the shape of arrows or in the image of boots or freshly-ironed laundry or a word stoop or a stairway's solid landing, the life leaps out at you, combative, determined, mute. You have to have traveled the streets by streetcar to realize how this running battle con-tinues up along the various stories and finally reaches its decisive pitch on the roofs. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. ~ Walter Benjamin

61I am prepared to ... assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussions in the very core of the brain. ~ Walter Benjamin

Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream. ~ Walter Benjamin

The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. ~ Walter Benjamin

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them ~ Walter Benjamin

How different everything would have been if they had been victorious in life who have won victory in death. ~ Walter Benjamin

The power of a text is different when it is read from 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. ~ Walter Benjamin

It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us back the Image of our Mind." Although the perception of It must be excited by some extraordinary perturbation in the looks and personality of the adored, the aura that It broadcasts arises not merely from the singularity of an original, as Walter Benjamin supposed, but also from the fabulous success of its reproducibility in the imaginations of many others, charmed exponentially by the number of its copies. The one-of-kind item must become a type, a replicable role-icon of itself--from "a Charles Hart" or "a Nell Gwyn" to "a Mary Pickford" or "a Douglas Fairbanks"--in order to unleash the Pygmalion effect in the hearts and minds of the fans, making the idea of him or her theirs--as much or more than anything else they might call their own. ~ Joseph Roach

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

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. ~ Walter Benjamin

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. ~ Walter Benjamin

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

It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are referred exclusively to man. One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also refer to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance. ~ Walter Benjamin