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
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
—Walter Benjamin
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
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
The killing of a criminal can be moral—but never its legitimation.
—Walter Benjamin
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
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
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
—Walter Benjamin
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Criticism
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
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
Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Absence
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
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Intelligence
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
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Charity, Giving
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Awareness, Perception
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
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 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
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
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
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Birth
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Photography
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Things, Little Things
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Quotations
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