Walter Benjamin Quotes - Page 6

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• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Running, Home, Age

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

  Walter Benjamin

  Substance, Conquer, Destruction

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.28, Harvard University Press

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• The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

  Walter Benjamin

  Winning, Past, Enemy

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.265, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

  Walter Benjamin

  Heart, Past, Mouths

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.265, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.

  Walter Benjamin

  Art, Unique, Location

  Walter Benjamin (2015). “Illuminations”, p.170, Random House

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• All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

  Walter Benjamin

  Touching, Disgusting

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.36, Harvard University Press

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

  Walter Benjamin

  Philosophy, Muse, Translations

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.

  Walter Benjamin

  Turtles, People, Personality

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• A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.

  Walter Benjamin

  Determination, Growth, Blind

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Edmund Jephcott (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.37, Harvard University Press

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• Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 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 Benjamin

  Book, Writing, People

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• ... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

  Walter Benjamin

  Simple, Reality, Yield

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

  Walter Benjamin

  Historical, Events, World

  "Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline". Book by Walter Benjamin, 1997.

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• It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.

  Walter Benjamin

  Writing, Enough Time, Small Villages

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• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Death, Feelings, Important

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.75, Harvard University Press

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• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Book, Treasure, Prove

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• For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

  Walter Benjamin

  Party, Springtime, Metaphor

  Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (1999). “Gesammelte Schriften”, p.216, Harvard University Press

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• 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

  Walter Benjamin

  Self, Order, World

  Walter Benjamin (1977). “The origin of German tragic drama”, New Left Books

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• What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

  Walter Benjamin

  Forgotten, Individual, Has Beens

  "Illuminations".

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• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

  Tasks, Language, Creation

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.90, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

  Walter Benjamin

  Enormous, Mankind, Models

  Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (1968). “Illuminations”, Schocken Books Incorporated

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