Quotes from WALTER BENJAMIN

History is written by the victors.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

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.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

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.

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

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

The work of memory collapses time.

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

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 digging.

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

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

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

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Humanity's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.