Walter benjamin quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

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

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

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

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

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

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.

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

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

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

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

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. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.

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.

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

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

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

The work of memory collapses time.

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.

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

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

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.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

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

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

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

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.

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. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

[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!

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

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.

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

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

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.

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

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

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

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.

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

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.

Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

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

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.

The distracted person, too, can form habits.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

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

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

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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 guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

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

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

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

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

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

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 at the moment of commemoration.

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.

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.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.

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

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

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.

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

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.

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

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

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

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.

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.

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 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.

In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring 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.

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has 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.

Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

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

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

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

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.

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

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

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.