Walter Benjamin Quotes & Sayings

Technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. — Walter Benjamin

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood
it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation
which these books arouse in a genuine collector. — Walter Benjamin

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form - it may be called fleeting or eternal - is in neither case the stuff that life is made of. — Walter Benjamin

Languages are not strangers to on another. — Walter Benjamin

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

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. — Walter Benjamin

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion. — Walter Benjamin

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man. — Walter Benjamin

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. — Walter Benjamin

Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope. — Walter Benjamin

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 in which dead cities lie interred. — Walter Benjamin

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. — Walter Benjamin

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

Nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious meaning. — Walter Benjamin

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe — Walter Benjamin

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, "And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?" "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day? — Walter Benjamin

For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of that which really concerns him. And that is precisely why the appearance of repetition doesn't exist for him in history; because the moments in the course of history which matter most to him become moments of the present through their index as "fore-history," and change their characteristics according to the catastrophic or triumphant determination of that present. — Walter Benjamin

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

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

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction. — Walter Benjamin

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

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

All disgust is originally disgust at touching. — Walter Benjamin

History is written by the victors. — Walter Benjamin

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home. — Walter Benjamin

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

Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there. — Walter Benjamin

The work of memory collapses time. — Walter Benjamin

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary. — Walter Benjamin

Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the ... — Walter Benjamin

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses. — Walter Benjamin

How different everything would have been if they had been victorious in life who have won victory in death. — Walter Benjamin

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. — Walter Benjamin

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books! — Walter Benjamin

A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. — Walter Benjamin

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

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

61I am prepared to ... assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussions in the very core of the brain. — Walter Benjamin

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright. — Walter Benjamin

How immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. — Walter Benjamin

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. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.3 — Walter Benjamin

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928]. — Walter Benjamin

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

What, in the end, makes advertisements superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon says - but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. — Walter Benjamin

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain. — Walter Benjamin

What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about — Walter Benjamin

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. — Walter Benjamin

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

But where the human form withdraws from photography, there for the first time display value gets the better of cultic value. And it is having set the scene for this process to occur that gives Atget, the man who captured so many deserted Parisian streets around 1900, his incomparable significance. Quite rightly it has been said of him that he recorded those streets like crime scenes. A crime scene, too, is deserted. Atget snaps clues. With Atget, photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history. — Walter Benjamin

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge. — Walter Benjamin

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. — Walter Benjamin

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. — Walter Benjamin

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation. — Walter Benjamin

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful! — Walter Benjamin

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

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity. — Walter Benjamin

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. — Walter Benjamin

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. — Walter Benjamin

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. — Walter Benjamin

Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received. — Walter Benjamin

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

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

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

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. — Walter Benjamin

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector. — Walter Benjamin

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

Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners - all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. — Walter Benjamin

The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it. — Walter Benjamin

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man. — Walter Benjamin

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than ... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them. — Walter Benjamin

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us. — Walter Benjamin

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 enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write ... — Walter Benjamin

Indeed, is not the homecoming amateur with his vast number of artistic snaps more contented than the hunter, returning laden with the game which is only of value to the trader. — Walter Benjamin

There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation. — Walter Benjamin

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

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. — Walter Benjamin

What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat ? — Walter Benjamin

In the fields with which we are concerned,
knowledge comes only in flashes. The text
is the thunder rolling long afterward. — Walter Benjamin

The camera ... on the one hand extends our comprehension of the necessities that rule our lives; on the other, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. — Walter Benjamin

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. — Walter Benjamin

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization. — Walter Benjamin

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn
the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. — Walter Benjamin

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. — Walter Benjamin

What is aura? A peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be. To follow, while reclining on a summer's noon, the outline of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch, which casts its shadow on the observer until the moment or the hour partakes of their presence - this is to breathe in the aura of these mountains, of this branch. Today, people have as passionate an inclination to bring things close to themselves or even more to the masses, as to overcome uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it. Every day the need grows more urgent to possess an object in the closest proximity, through a picture or, better, a reproduction. And the reproduction, as the illustrated newspaper and weekly readily prove, distinguishes itself unmistakably from the picture. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely intertwined in the latter as transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. — Walter Benjamin

Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscape of the body ... These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it still more deeply into the universe of matter. — Walter Benjamin

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

Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order. — Walter Benjamin

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

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 the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. — Walter Benjamin

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

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. — Walter Benjamin

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 of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. — Walter Benjamin

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. — Walter Benjamin

The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. — Walter Benjamin

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

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ... — Walter Benjamin

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. — Walter Benjamin

The book borrower ... proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures ... as by his failure to read these books. — Walter Benjamin

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize "how it really was." It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. — Walter Benjamin

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