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

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

Walter Benjamin

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

Walter Benjamin

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

Walter Benjamin

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

Walter Benjamin

Reside en una iluminación profana, en una inspiración materialista, antropológica, para la que el hachís, el opio, o lo que sea, puede representar la escuela preparatoria.

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 ...

Walter Benjamin

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

Walter Benjamin

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a re...

Walter Benjamin

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come ali...

Walter Benjamin

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the a...

Walter Benjamin

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

Walter Benjamin

The work of memory collapses time.

Walter Benjamin

In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.

Walter Benjamin

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

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