Walter Benjamin Quotes - Page 4

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• The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

  Walter Benjamin

  Fruit, Understood, Seeds

  Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (1968). “Illuminations”, Schocken Books Incorporated

  13 Copy quote

• The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has 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

  Dream, Book, Reading

  "One-Way Street".

  14 Copy quote

• Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

  Walter Benjamin

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Walter Benjamin (1996). “Selected Writings: 1927-1934”, p.488, Harvard University Press

  69 Copy quote

• Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

  Walter Benjamin

  Death, Stories, Storytelling

  "Illuminations".

  15 Copy quote

• For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.

  Walter Benjamin

  Men, Intellectual, May

  Walter Benjamin (2006). “On Hashish”, p.21, Harvard University Press

  6 Copy quote

• The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.

  Walter Benjamin

  Character, Age, Cheerful

  "Selected Writings: 1927-1934".

  6 Copy quote

• The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

  Walter Benjamin

  Cities, Veils, Crowds

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (2002). “Selected Writings: 1935-1938”, p.40, Harvard University Press

  8 Copy quote

• The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

  Walter Benjamin

  Fashion, Art, Ideas

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.460, Harvard University Press

  17 Copy quote

• Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Memories, Lying, Past

  "Selected Writings: 1927-1934".

  7 Copy quote

• Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

  Walter Benjamin

  Giving, Shock, Receiver

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.53, Harvard University Press

  15 Copy quote

• What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

  Walter Benjamin

  Use, Demand, Photographer

  Walter Benjamin (2003). “Understanding Brecht (New Edition)”, p.95, Verso

  6 Copy quote

• You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.

  Walter Benjamin

  Rose, Path, Cannabis

  Walter Benjamin (2006). “On Hashish”, p.22, Harvard University Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, People

  Walter Benjamin (1996). “Selected Writings: 1927-1934”, p.488, Harvard University Press

  17 Copy quote

• Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

  Walter Benjamin

  Oil, Doe, Machines

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Edmund Jephcott (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.21, Harvard University Press

  7 Copy quote

• The distracted person, too, can form habits.

  Walter Benjamin

  Habit, Form, Distracted

  Walter Benjamin (2015). “Illuminations”, p.182, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

  Walter Benjamin

  Years, Here I Am, Space

  "Selected Writings: 1927-1934".

  52 Copy quote

• Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

  Walter Benjamin

  Truth, Writing, Self

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.72, Harvard University Press

  41 Copy quote

• Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

  Walter Benjamin

  Memories, Book, Men

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.483, Harvard University Press

  91 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Criticism, Aversion

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.244, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

  Walter Benjamin

  Bourgeoisie, Ruins, Commodity

  Walter Benjamin, Peter Demetz (1986). “Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writing”, Schocken

  4 Copy quote

• To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

  Walter Benjamin

  Mean, Looks, Auras

  Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (1968). “Illuminations”, Schocken Books Incorporated

  6 Copy quote

• 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. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.

  Walter Benjamin

  Fate, Men, Hands

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.482, Harvard University Press

  61 Copy quote

• As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

  Walter Benjamin

  Long, Myth, Beggar

  Walter Benjamin, Rolf Tiedemann (1999). “The Arcades Project”, p.404, Harvard University Press

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Sight, Justice, Peculiar

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.154, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

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

  Walter Benjamin

  Art, Epic, Dying

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.97, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

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