Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
