Walter Benjamin Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Writing #Ideas #Delay
“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Happiness #Being Happy #Fear
“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Love #Friendship #Relationship
“He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. . . . He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand -like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery -in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Real #Past #Men
“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

#Book #Writing #People
“The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Fruit #Understood
“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Race #World #May
“Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Ruins #Realms #Allegory
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Memories #Passion #Borders
“Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Life #Morning #Lying
“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

#Writing #Musical #Three
“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

#Writing #Musical #Three
“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Photography #Doe #Optics
“All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Blow
“The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Happiness #Ideas #Too Much
“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Death #Stories #Authority
“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Art #Epic #Dying
“Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Conviction #Leap #Strollers
“All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Intelligence #Interpretation #Form
“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Dream #Eggs #Boredom
“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Ideas #Progress #Status Quo
“Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Giving #Shock
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Memories #Lying #Past
“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

#Attitude #Media #Judging
“Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Order #Balance #Balancing Act
“He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Lying #Vests #Dresses
“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

#Notebook #Dream #Art
“Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Learning #Photograph #Illiterate
“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

#Book #Order #Boredom
“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”
-- Walter Benjamin

#Travel #Book #Cities

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