Illuminations

by Walter Benjamin

‘Être un homme utile m’a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.’

Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.

Linguistic ‘transference’ enables us to give material form to the invisible – ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ – and thus to render it capable of being experienced.

Crude thoughts, on the contrary, should be part and parcel of dialectical thinking, because they are nothing but the referral of theory to practice … a thought must be crude to come into its own in action’

And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafés which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along.

Thus, ever since the Second Empire the city has been the paradise of all those who need to chase after no livelihood, pursue no career, reach no goal – the paradise, then, of bohemians, and not only of artists and writers but of all those who have gathered about them because they could not be integrated either politically – being homeless or stateless – or socially.

aphorism if he had not been paid by the line. He was certainly