German Jewish philosopher (1892-1940)
Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
WALTER BENJAMIN
Unpacking My Library
Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values--inexperienceable--which we serve.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"Experience", Selected Writing
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Life of Students
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
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
"Experience", Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait.... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time.... From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"The Metaphysics of Youth", Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
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
Reflections
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Storyteller
Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Task of the Translator
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Walter Benjamin's Archive