"We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector."
― Walter Benjamin
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"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."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method."
― Walter Benjamin
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"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
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"As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend."
― Walter Benjamin
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"To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright."
― Walter Benjamin
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"There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Literature tells very little to those who understand it."
― Walter Benjamin |
"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."
― Walter Benjamin
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"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."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock."
― Walter Benjamin
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"The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flaneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room."
― Walter Benjamin
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"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
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"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."
― Walter Benjamin
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"The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The experience of our generation:
that capitalism will not die a natural death."
― Walter Benjamin |
"History breaks down into images, not into stories."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories."
― Walter Benjamin
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"No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past."
― Walter Benjamin
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"I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays."
― Walter Benjamin
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"To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves."
― Walter Benjamin
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"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 Benjamin
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"For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."
― Walter Benjamin
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"I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain."
― Walter Benjamin
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