Ideas Objects Quotes by Walter Benjamin

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

— Walter Benjamin

“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely…

— Walter Benjamin

“It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are referred exclusively to man.…

— Walter Benjamin

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

— 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

“to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.”

— Walter Benjamin

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative…

— Walter Benjamin

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

— Walter Benjamin

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense…

— Walter Benjamin

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to…

— Walter Benjamin

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

— Walter Benjamin

There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to…

— Walter Benjamin