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Walter Benjamin Quotes

1892–1940 Germany

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish literary critic and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

Germany
Essayists
Philosophers
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Also known as: Benjamin, Walter

Random Walter Benjamin quote

50 quotes

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.

The Life of Students (1915)

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

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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.

The Storyteller (1936)

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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

Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.

Arcades Project (1927)

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.

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.

Capitalism as Religion (1921)

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

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth—that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.

Goethe's Elective Affinities (1924)

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.

Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

The diary ... is the unfathomable document of a life never lived, the book of a life in whose time everything that we experienced inadequately is transformed into experience perfected.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Walter Benjamin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.