Reflections Quotes

“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

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

“Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.”
― Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings