The killing of a criminal can be moral—but never its legitimation.
—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
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
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
—Walter Benjamin
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Birth
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Advice
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
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
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
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Bores, Boredom
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Quotations
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
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 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
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
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Facts
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Relationships
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
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Beauty, Sharing, Happiness
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
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
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Communism, Socialism
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Intelligence
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Storytelling
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Criticism
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: Eating, Food
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
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
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
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
Leave a Reply