Quotes from WALTER BENJAMIN

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

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

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

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

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

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

History is written by the victors.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

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.

Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

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

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

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

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.

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.