Walter Benjamin Quotes - Page 2

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

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.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

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

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

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.

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

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

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.

Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.