Walter Benjamin Quotes

97 quotes in 1460 categories

• Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium…
• It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the…
• He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
• Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
• The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
• Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
• The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
• Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
• The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional…
• All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
• Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
• The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
• Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one…
• The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
• To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
• Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly.…
• Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine…
• Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
• The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
• Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange…

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