Quotes from benjamin walter iv

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.

History breaks down in images not into stories.

Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.

Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth--that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.

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

To be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions.

Life is in fact mortal, and the immortal things are flesh, energy, individuality, and spirit in its various guises.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

Man is the knower in the same language in which God is creator. God created him in his image, he created the knower in the image of the creator.

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.