Quotes About Walter Benjamin

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

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

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

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And

Mind you, according to Walter Benjamin, the twentieth century's great philosopher of collecting, browsing and what we'd now call vintage shopping, 'the non-reading of books' is a defining characteristic of serious bibliomaniacs; he cites Anatole France, who blithely admitted that he'd barely read one-tenth of the books in his library.)

Walter Benjamin's conviction that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption, that what he called the "time of now" is "shot through with chips of Messianic time." (Kenneth Rexroth used the same word: "scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.") If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there.

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

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

Walter Benjamin writes: The talent of a good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not. . . to his own benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he wants to say.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

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

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

Podría decirse que los proverbios son ruinas que están en el lugar de viejas historias, y donde, como la hiedra en la muralla, una moraleja trepa sobre un gesto

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.