Quotes by Walter Benjamin

About Walter Benjamin:

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin is associated with the Frankfurt School. He was also related by marriage to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to his cousin, Günther Anders. Among Benjamin's major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Baudelaire, and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.

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 dig...

Walter Benjamin

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.

Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.

Walter Benjamin

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.

Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Walter Benjamin

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

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

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

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 hatch...

Walter Benjamin

Languages are not strangers to on another.

Walter Benjamin

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recoll...

Walter Benjamin

What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.

Walter Benjamin

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; ...

Walter Benjamin

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

Walter Benjamin

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

Author Bio

  • NameWalter Benjamin
  • DescriptionGerman literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)
  • AliasesWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
  • BornJuly 15, 1892
  • DiedSeptember 26, 1940
  • CountryGermany
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer; Translator; Essayist