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
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Storytelling
The book borrower…proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures…as by his failure to read these books.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Books
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
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Authority, Storytelling
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
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
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
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: Self-Knowledge, Identity
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Little Things, Things
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Opinion, Public opinion
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
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Advice
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 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
Topics: Art, Arts, Enjoyment, Artists
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Birth
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
Topics: Cities, City Life
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
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Manners
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Relationships
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Beauty, Sharing, Happiness
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: Opinion, Opinions
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Quotations
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Bores, Boredom
The killing of a criminal can be moral—but never its legitimation.
—Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Photography
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Socialism, Communism
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Facts
The power of a text is different when it is read from 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
Topics: Reading, Books
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 in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography