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…

— Walter Benjamin

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

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Walter Benjamin

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus…

— Walter Benjamin

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

— Walter Benjamin

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction…

— Walter Benjamin

Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are…

— Walter Benjamin

“Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.”

— Walter Benjamin

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

— Walter Benjamin

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is…

— Walter Benjamin

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

— Walter Benjamin

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms…

— Walter Benjamin

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they…

— Walter Benjamin

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is…

— Walter Benjamin

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

— Walter Benjamin

The work of memory collapses time.

— Walter Benjamin