Walter Benjamin Quotes

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an ar...

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is n...

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him...

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust i...

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction betw...

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rul...

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him aw...

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapabl...

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when i...

The work of memory collapses time.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control ...

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor...

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one h...

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experie...

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experie...

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is becaus...

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of ope...

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his me...

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfi...

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from de...

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is bec...

Languages are not strangers to on another.

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinc...

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they ...

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thoug...

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is...

History is written by the victors.