Quotes from WALTER BENJAMIN

The work of memory collapses time.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

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

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.

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.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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 the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

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

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

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

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

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.

The gaze of nature, when thus awakened, dreams and pulls the poet after its dream. Words, too, can have an aura of their own.

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.

Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ... The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...