Walter Benjamin Quotes

124 Sourced Quotes

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

Walter Benjamin
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
Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

Walter Benjamin
Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

Walter Benjamin
Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority.... Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.

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

Walter Benjamin
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.

Walter Benjamin
In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.

Walter Benjamin
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

Walter Benjamin
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

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
Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals.... The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.

Walter Benjamin
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

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

Walter Benjamin
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Walter Benjamin
The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.

Walter Benjamin
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

Walter Benjamin
If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?

Walter Benjamin
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

Walter Benjamin
The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to the effort of the great geniuses that created them, but also to the unnamed drudgery of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.

Walter Benjamin
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

Walter Benjamin
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his convictions.

Walter Benjamin
Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

Walter Benjamin
The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.

Walter Benjamin
The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

Walter Benjamin
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

Walter Benjamin