Walter Benjamin Quotes

97 quotes in 1460 categories

• Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
• Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
• All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as…
• The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
• The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul…
• 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 perception…
• Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.
• There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego…
• If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once…
• It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not…
• In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
• The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
• Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
• Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the...
• These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
• The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for…
• The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which…
• Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth…
• The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
• Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

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