Quotes from WALTER BENJAMIN

Such an animal will swing indecisively from one worry to the next, giving a nip at each fear in turn, displaying the fickleness of despair.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

The weightiest objection to the mode of life of the confirmed bachelor: he eats by himself. Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse—it is only in company that eating is done justice.

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.

Es bringt uns nämlich nicht weiter, die rätselhafte Seite am Rätselhaften pathetisch oder fanatisch zu unterstreichen; vielmehr durchdringen wir das Geheimnis nur in dem Grade, als wir es im Alltäglichen wiederfinden, kraft einer dialektischen Optik, die das Alltägliche als undurchdringlich, das Undurchdringliche als alltäglich erkennt...

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

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

A cronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history, To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past - which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has past become citable in all its moments.

Man's gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.

These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.

What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat ?

The illiterate of the future', it has been said, 'will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph'. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.

A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.

Reside en una iluminación profana, en una inspiración materialista, antropológica, para la que el hachís, el opio, o lo que sea, puede representar la escuela preparatoria.

the poem that philosophically makes good the defect of languages

Daß es so weiter geht, ist die Katastrophe. Sie ist nicht das jeweils Bevorstehende sondern das jeweils Gegebene.

How immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

Das Kunstwerk ist grundsätzlich immer reproduzierbar gewesen. Was Menschen gemacht hatten, das konnte immer von Menschen nachgemacht werden.