Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage… — 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… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“Man's gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage… — 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
... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. . . . He must not… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“What is aura? A peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be. To… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close…… — 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
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a… — 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
![“... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say…” quote by Walter Benjamin](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/884/walter-benjamin-1723_artificial_l-ess-than-at-any-time-does-a-simple-rep_1724184.jpg)
