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Media
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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Memory
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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
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
-Walter Benjamin
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Opinion
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
-Walter Benjamin
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
-Walter Benjamin
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Past, the
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
-Walter Benjamin
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Perception
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
-Walter Benjamin
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Photography
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
-Walter Benjamin
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Prophecy
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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. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.
-Walter Benjamin
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Quotations
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
-Walter Benjamin
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Reading
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.
-Walter Benjamin
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Relationships
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
-Walter Benjamin
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Storytelling
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
-Walter Benjamin
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
-Walter Benjamin
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Things, Little Things
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
-Walter Benjamin
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Translation
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
-Walter Benjamin
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Truth
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
-Walter Benjamin
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Books by and about Walter Benjamin