Walter Benjamin Quotes
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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.
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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.
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History breaks down in images not into stories.
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Man geht immer die gleichen Wege des Denkens wie vorher. Nur scheinen sie mit Rosen bestreut.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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.
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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.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Besteht das Original nicht um dessentwillen, wie ließe sich dann die Übersetzung aus dieser Beziehung verstehen?
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An das Leben der Studenten tritt die Frage nach seiner bewußten Einheit heran. ... Das Auszeichnende im Studentenleben ist in der Tat der Gegenwille, sich einem Prinzip zu unterwerfen, mit der Idee sich zu durchdringen. Der Name der Wissenschaft dient vorzüglich, eine tiefeingesessene, verbürgerte Indifferenz zu verbergen.
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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.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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.
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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.
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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.