Walter Benjamin Quotes - Page 4

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

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.

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

The distracted person, too, can form habits.

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.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

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.

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.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.