Walter Benjamin Quotes

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

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

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.

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

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

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

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 work of memory collapses time.

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

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

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

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

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

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.

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

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.

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.

Literature tells very little to those who understand it.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The distracted person, too, can form habits.