Walter Benjamin Quotes - Page 5

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• In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

  Walter Benjamin

  Dream, Individuality, Teeth

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Rodney Livingstone (2005). “Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings”, p.208, Harvard University Press

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• If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

  Walter Benjamin

  Blood, Law, Guilt

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.249, Harvard University Press

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• Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.

  Walter Benjamin

  Lying, Father, Integrity

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• Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.

  Walter Benjamin

  Past, Views, Abortion

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Edmund Jephcott (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.60, Harvard University Press

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• Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

  Walter Benjamin

  Sake, Hopeless, Given

  "Illuminations".

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• Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

  Walter Benjamin

  Notebook, Aliens, Authority

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.458, Harvard University Press

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• Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

  Walter Benjamin

  Ignorance, Feet, Cities

  Walter Benjamin (1996). “Selected Writings: 1927-1934”, p.598, Harvard University Press

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• Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

  Walter Benjamin

  Rotten, Mundane Life, Privacy

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland (1996). “Selected Writings: 1913-1926”, p.484, Harvard University Press

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• Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

  Walter Benjamin

  Hierarchy, Taught, Communism

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• By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

  Walter Benjamin

  Hands, Fields, Cameras

  "Illuminations".

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• How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

  Walter Benjamin

  Travel, Book, Cities

  Walter Benjamin (2015). “Illuminations”, p.50, Random House

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• 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

  Art, Unique, Location

  Walter Benjamin (2015). “Illuminations”, p.170, Random House

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• Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

  Walter Benjamin

  Stars, Ideas, Constellations

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• All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

  Walter Benjamin

  Time, Giving, Consistency

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• Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

  Walter Benjamin

  Attitude, Should, Relation

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty (2008). “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media”, p.81, Harvard University Press

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• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Events, Dexterity, May

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

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• For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

  Walter Benjamin

  Might, Messiah, Gates

  Walter Benjamin (2015). “Illuminations”, p.200, Random House

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• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Book, Order, Boredom

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (1999). “Gesammelte Schriften”, p.486, Harvard University Press

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• Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

  Walter Benjamin

  Memories, Book, Sunday

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Rodney Livingstone (2005). “Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings”, p.287, Harvard University Press

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• [Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

  Walter Benjamin

  Beautiful, Photography, Rivers

  Walter Benjamin (2003). “Understanding Brecht (New Edition)”, p.94, Verso

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• Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

  Walter Benjamin

  Distance, Emotional, Effort

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• Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

  Walter Benjamin

  Attitude, Mean, Giving

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• We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

  Walter Benjamin

  Life, Long, House

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.32, Harvard University Press

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• Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them

  Walter Benjamin

  Self, Order, World

  Walter Benjamin (1977). “The origin of German tragic drama”, New Left Books

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• I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

  Walter Benjamin

  Mountain, Mice

  "Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline". Book by Walter Benjamin, 1997.

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