Quotes from WALTER BENJAMIN

to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.

Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.

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

The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland's sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.

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

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

For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of that which really concerns him. And that is precisely why the appearance of repetition doesn't exist for him in history; because the moments in the course of history which matter most to him become moments of the present through their index as fore-history, and change their characteristics according to the catastrophic or triumphant determination of that present.

nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [ Ende ]. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious meaning.

A real translation is transparent.

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

From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.

Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.

Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful character unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.