Top 150 Walter Benjamin Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.”

— Walter Benjamin

102. “The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.”

— Walter Benjamin

103. “You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.”

— Walter Benjamin

104. “The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.”

— Walter Benjamin

105. “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”

— Walter Benjamin

106. “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.”

— Walter Benjamin

107. “A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling – even against all reason – makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.”

— Walter Benjamin

108. “Pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in IG Farben and the peaceful perfecting of the air force. But what now? What next?”

— Walter Benjamin

109. “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments.”

— Walter Benjamin

110. “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

— Walter Benjamin

111. “Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the...”

— Walter Benjamin

112. “Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.”

— Walter Benjamin

113. “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”

— Walter Benjamin

114. “Every line we succeed in publishing today – no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it – is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”

— Walter Benjamin

115. “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

— Walter Benjamin

116. “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

— Walter Benjamin

117. “Literature tells very little to those who understand it.”

— Walter Benjamin

118. “In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland’s sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.”

— Walter Benjamin

119. “Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

— Walter Benjamin

120. “Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”

— Walter Benjamin

121. “For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.”

— Walter Benjamin

122. “All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”

— Walter Benjamin

123. “Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

— Walter Benjamin

124. “The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions.”

— Walter Benjamin

125. “What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”

— Walter Benjamin

126. “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies.”

— Walter Benjamin

127. “Inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content.”

— Walter Benjamin

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

— Walter Benjamin

129. “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.”

— Walter Benjamin

130. “History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.”

— Walter Benjamin

131. “Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”

— Walter Benjamin

132. “In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.”

— Walter Benjamin

133. “Languages are not strangers to on another.”

— Walter Benjamin

134. “The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.”

— Walter Benjamin

135. “To do justice to the figure of Kafka it its purity and peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing; it is the purity and beauty of failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable that the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.”

— Walter Benjamin

136. “From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

— Walter Benjamin

137. “Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.”

— Walter Benjamin

138. “A real translation is transparent.”

— Walter Benjamin

139. “Such an animal will swing indecisively from one worry to the next, giving a nip at each fear in turn, displaying the fickleness of despair.”

— Walter Benjamin

140. “The illiterate of the future’, it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph’. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?”

— Walter Benjamin

141. “The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by aeroplane.”

— Walter Benjamin

142. “The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”

— Walter Benjamin

143. “A cronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history, To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has past become citable in all its moments.”

— Walter Benjamin

144. “The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder.”

— Walter Benjamin

145. “If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.”

— Walter Benjamin

146. “We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected.”

— Walter Benjamin

147. “The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry’s language itself.”

— Walter Benjamin

148. “The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.”

— Walter Benjamin

149. “Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift in seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his memetic faculty does not play a decisive role.”

— Walter Benjamin

150. “The weightiest objection to the mode of life of the confirmed bachelor: he eats by himself. Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse – it is only in company that eating is done justice.”

— Walter Benjamin