Top 150 Walter Benjamin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.”

— Walter Benjamin

2. “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

— Walter Benjamin

3. “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”

— Walter Benjamin

4. “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”

— Walter Benjamin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

5. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

— Walter Benjamin

6. “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

— Walter Benjamin

7. “The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.”

— Walter Benjamin

Featured in: Progress Quotes

8. “The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.”

— Walter Benjamin

9. “I came into the world under the sign of Saturn – the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”

— Walter Benjamin

10. “The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”

— Walter Benjamin

11. “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”

— Walter Benjamin

12. “Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.”

— Walter Benjamin

13. “The work of memory collapses time.”

— Walter Benjamin

14. “We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.”

— Walter Benjamin

15. “Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.”

— Walter Benjamin

16. “You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps – his tastes, his interest, his habits.”

— Walter Benjamin

17. “Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.”

— Walter Benjamin

18. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

— Walter Benjamin

19. “For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.”

— Walter Benjamin

20. “As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.”

— Walter Benjamin

21. “All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”

— Walter Benjamin

22. “It is only for those without hope that hope is given.”

— Walter Benjamin

23. “The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.”

— Walter Benjamin

24. “Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.”

— Walter Benjamin

25. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”

— Walter Benjamin

26. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”

— Walter Benjamin

27. “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. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.”

— Walter Benjamin

28. “The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.”

— Walter Benjamin

29. “True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.”

— Walter Benjamin

30. “Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.”

— Walter Benjamin

31. “There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.”

— Walter Benjamin

32. “The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.”

— Walter Benjamin

33. “Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.”

— Walter Benjamin

34. “Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”

— Walter Benjamin

35. “In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.”

— Walter Benjamin

36. “Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.”

— Walter Benjamin

37. “He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.”

— Walter Benjamin

38. “Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.”

— Walter Benjamin

39. “What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.”

— Walter Benjamin

40. “These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”

— Walter Benjamin

41. “Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”

— Walter Benjamin

42. “In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”

— Walter Benjamin

43. “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 redeem them.”

— Walter Benjamin

44. “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 perception.”

— Walter Benjamin

45. “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”

— Walter Benjamin

46. “In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.”

— Walter Benjamin

47. “The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.”

— Walter Benjamin

48. “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

— Walter Benjamin

49. “Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”

— Walter Benjamin

50. “Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.”

— Walter Benjamin