Quotes from benjamin walter iii

The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.

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

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.

Knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.

For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.

For in reality there exists a fundamental identity between the word that, after the promise of the snake, knows good and evil, and the externally communicating word. The knowledge of things resides in name, whereas that of good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word, "prattle," and knows only one purification and elevation, to which the prattling man, the sinner, was therefore submitted: judgment.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe.

There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

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.

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.

We must not forget that the most enduring modifications in toys are never the work of adults, whether they be educators, manufacturers or writers, but are the result of children at play.