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 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
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
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
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
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: Autobiography, Legacy
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
—Walter Benjamin
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Opinion, Public 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
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 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
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
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Intelligence
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
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
—Walter Benjamin
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Beauty, Sharing, Happiness
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 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
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Birth
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Storytelling, Authority
Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Absence
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: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
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
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Giving, Charity
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 observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Manners
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
—Walter Benjamin
Topics: Storytelling
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: The Past, Past
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
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
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