German Jewish philosopher (1892-1940)
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
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.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings
I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writing
God's linguistic being is the word. All human language is only reflection of the word in name. Name is no closer to the word than knowledge to creation. The infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytical in nature in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
Knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Arcades Project
All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Task of the Translator
The work is the death mask of its conception.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Storyteller
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.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Illuminations
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings
The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Arcades Project
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 76
The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"The Task of the Translator"