Walter Benjamin quotes - page 4

Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the "dreams of his youth."... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth. (Walter Benjamin)
Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions.
Walter Benjamin
The question to address is that of the conscious unity of student life ... the will to submit to a principle, to identify completely with an idea. The concept of "science" or scholarly discipline serves primarily to conceal a deep-rooted bourgeois indifference.
Walter Benjamin
If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?
Walter Benjamin
All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.
Walter Benjamin
A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.
Walter Benjamin
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
Walter Benjamin
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Walter Benjamin
Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
Walter Benjamin
This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin)
Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.
Walter Benjamin
History is written by the victors.
Walter Benjamin
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.
Walter Benjamin
That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
Walter Benjamin
In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.
Walter Benjamin
The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
Walter Benjamin
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter Benjamin
We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations. (Walter Benjamin)
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
Walter Benjamin
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Walter Benjamin
To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
Walter Benjamin