Walter Benjamin Quotes

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

The work of memory collapses time.

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

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

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

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

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

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.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

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

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.