Walter Benjamin > Quotes

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― 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, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“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

“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“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, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

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

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying 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. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...”
― Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

“You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“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, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“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

“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”
― 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, One Way Street And Other Writings

“In other words, the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.”
― 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, On The Concept Of History

“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, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“It is only for those without hope that hope is given.”
― Walter Benjamin

“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

“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].”
― Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

“What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.”
― 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, Aesthetics and Politics

“Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscape of the body... These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it still more deeply into the universe of matter.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.”
― Walter Benjamin

“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“...nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious meaning.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The work of memory collapses time.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“The distracted person, too, can form habits.”
― Walter Benjamin

“to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

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

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
― Walter Benjamin

“All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.”
― Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

“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

“الأعمال المكتملة أقل وزنا بالنسبة للأشخاص العظام من تلك الشذرات التى يستمر عملهم عليها طوال حياتهم. فالشخص الأشد وهنا، والأكثر تشتتا، هو وحده الذى يستمد لذة لا مثيل لها من بلوغ الخاتمة وبذلك يشعر بأنه قد عاد إلى حياته من جديد. أما بالنسبة للعبقرى فإن كل إنقطاع، حتى ضربات القدر العنيفة، يسقط عليها الوسن اللذيذ، فى الكدح الدؤوب لورشة عمله ذاتها. والسطوة السحرية لذلك الكدح هى التى يجمع أطرافها فى الشذرة." العبقرية هى كدح دؤوب”
― Walter Benjamin

“Recordar lo que para mí han sido los primero libros me exige olvidar desde el principio todo lo que sé de libros. Ciertamente toda mi actual sabiduría se basa en la disposición con la que ya entonces me enfrentaba al libro. Pero así como en el día de hoy tema y contenido, objeto y materia, se enfrentan al libro como algo exterior, entonces se encontraba todo fundido en él, no era algo independiente de él. El mundo abierto en el libro y el libro mismo no podían separarse bajo ningún concepto: formaban un todo perfecto. De esta forma, junto al libro, también podían cogerse con la mano su contenido, su mundo, como si tuvieran asas. Y este mundo, el contenido, glorificaban a su vez al libro en todas sus partes: palpitando en él, iluminado desde él. Y no sólo anidaban en la portada o en los grabados. Su casa estaba también en los títulos de los capítulos, en las letras especiales con que empezaban, en los puntos y aparte, en las columnas, etc. Los libros no se leían sin más, no; se vivían, se moraba entre sus líneas...”
― Walter Benjamin

“A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader(For even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener.) In this solitude of his, the reader of
a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace. The suspense which permeates the novel is
very much like the draft which stimulates the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its play.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The book borrower… proves himself to be an in venerate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures… as by his failure to read these books. ”
― Walter Benjamin

“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.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Es bringt uns nämlich nicht weiter, die rätselhafte Seite am Rätselhaften pathetisch oder fanatisch zu unterstreichen; vielmehr durchdringen wir das Geheimnis nur in dem Grade, als wir es im Alltäglichen wiederfinden, kraft einer dialektischen Optik, die das Alltägliche als undurchdringlich, das Undurchdringliche als alltäglich erkennt...”
― Walter Benjamin

“We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections

“Languages are not strangers to on another.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays And Reflections