Top 150 Walter Benjamin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”

— Walter Benjamin

52. “To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”

— Walter Benjamin

53. “That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe.”

— Walter Benjamin

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

— Walter Benjamin

55. “The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.”

— Walter Benjamin

56. “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.”

— Walter Benjamin

57. “Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

— Walter Benjamin

58. “Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.”

— Walter Benjamin

59. “In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.”

— Walter Benjamin

60. “Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”

— Walter Benjamin

61. “To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”

— Walter Benjamin

62. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.”

— Walter Benjamin

63. “A real translation is transparent.”

— Walter Benjamin

64. “For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”

— Walter Benjamin

65. “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”

— Walter Benjamin

66. “We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.”

— Walter Benjamin

67. “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 is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.”

— Walter Benjamin

68. “Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

— Walter Benjamin

69. “Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

— Walter Benjamin

70. “Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.”

— Walter Benjamin

71. “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

— Walter Benjamin

72. “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.”

— Walter Benjamin

73. “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 wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help...”

— Walter Benjamin

74. “All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”

— Walter Benjamin

75. “Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.”

— Walter Benjamin

76. “Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.”

— Walter Benjamin

77. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

— Walter Benjamin

78. “Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?”

— Walter Benjamin

79. “Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.”

— Walter Benjamin

80. “A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.”

— Walter Benjamin

81. “Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.”

— Walter Benjamin

82. “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”

— Walter Benjamin

83. “The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”

— Walter Benjamin

84. “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 oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.”

— Walter Benjamin

85. “The distracted person, too, can form habits.”

— Walter Benjamin

86. “I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.”

— Walter Benjamin

87. “Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.”

— Walter Benjamin

88. “How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”

— Walter Benjamin

89. “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”

— Walter Benjamin

90. “Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.”

— Walter Benjamin

91. “As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.”

— Walter Benjamin

92. “We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.”

— Walter Benjamin

93. “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 giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.”

— Walter Benjamin

94. “Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.”

— Walter Benjamin

95. “Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.”

— Walter Benjamin

96. “The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.”

— Walter Benjamin

97. “In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.”

— Walter Benjamin

98. “In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.”

— Walter Benjamin

99. “Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.”

— Walter Benjamin

100. “To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.”

— Walter Benjamin