Walter Benjamin Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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The work is the death mask of its conception.

Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

Walter Benjamin
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

Walter Benjamin
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.

Walter Benjamin
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

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

Walter Benjamin
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

Walter Benjamin
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.

Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Walter Benjamin
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

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

Walter Benjamin
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.

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

Walter Benjamin
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

Walter Benjamin
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

Walter Benjamin
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

Walter Benjamin
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Benjamin
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Walter Benjamin
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Walter Benjamin
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

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

Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

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

Walter Benjamin