Walter Benjamin > Quotes

“History is written by the victors.”
― Walter Benjamin

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
― Walter Benjamin

“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, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
― Walter Benjamin

“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“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.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“The work of memory collapses time.”
― Walter Benjamin

“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, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying 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. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
― Walter Benjamin

“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“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.”
― Walter Benjamin

“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.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].”
― Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

“I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”
― Walter Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.”
― Walter Benjamin

“It is only for those without hope that hope is given.”
― Walter Benjamin

“All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”
― Walter Benjamin

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. 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. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections