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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 Translators Also known as: Benjamin, Walter
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The critic does not pass judgment on the work; rather, art itself passes judgment, either by taking up the work in the medium of criticism or by rejecting it and thereby appraising it as beneath all criticism.
The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1919)
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.
Main features of my first impression of hashish (1927)
Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values—inexperienceable—which we serve.
Experience (1913)
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.
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.
Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting (1931)
For the Romantics and for speculative philosophy, ... to be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions.
The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1919)
A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.
One Way Street (1928)
Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus ("Unpacking my library", 1931), p. 2
The question to address is that of the conscious unity of student life ... the will to submit to a principle, to identify completely with an idea. The concept of "science" or scholarly discipline serves primarily to conceal a deep-rooted bourgeois indifference.
The Life of Students (1915)
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.
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