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A list of quotes from Walter Benjamin. Here are the best Walter Benjamin quotes on various subjects. The Walter Benjamin quotations list is alphabetical but can be sorted by any column. Enjoy these sayings coined by Walter Benjamin. You're able to copy this list to build your own just like it, re-rank it to fit your opinions, then publish it to share it with your Twitter followers, Facebook friends or with any other social networks you use on a regular basis.
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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 BenjaminBeggars - 2
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 BenjaminTranslation - 3
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter BenjaminDebate - 4
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Walter BenjaminBores and Boredom - 5
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter BenjaminAdvice -
- 6
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter BenjaminStory and Story-Telling - 7
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter BenjaminThings and Little Things - 8
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Walter BenjaminCommunism and Socialism - 9
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter BenjaminLiterary criticism - 10
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Walter BenjaminGiving - 11
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.
Walter BenjaminPrediction - 12
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
Walter BenjaminEtiquette - 13
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. 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. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand --like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery --in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
Walter BenjaminSelf-knowledge - 14
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.
Walter BenjaminMedia - 15
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter BenjaminMemory -
- 16
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter BenjaminProcreation - 17
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 BenjaminMemory - 18
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.
Walter BenjaminCities and City Life - 19
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 BenjaminTruth - 20
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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 BenjaminBooks and Reading - 21
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.
Walter BenjaminExperience - 22
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter BenjaminPublic opinion - 23
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 BenjaminOpinions - 24
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Walter BenjaminQuotation - 25
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 BenjaminAutobiography
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