The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
—Walter Benjamin
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Media
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
Topics: Charity
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
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Photography
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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
Topics: Books, Reading
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
Topics: Memory
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Bores, Boredom
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Public opinion, Opinion
The killing of a criminal can be moral—but never its legitimation.
—Walter Benjamin
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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Experience
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Birth
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Perception, Awareness
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
—Walter Benjamin
Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Food, Eating
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Memory
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Manners
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. 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 all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Identity, Self-Knowledge
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
—Walter Benjamin
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Advice
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Storytelling, Authority
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Past, The Past
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
—Walter Benjamin
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his “competence.” Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Apathy
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Facts
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
Topics: Prophecy
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
Topics: Life and Living
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
Topics: Truth
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Things, Little Things
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