Walter Benjamin
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.Collection: Fruit
The distracted person, too, can form habits.Collection: Habit
The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has 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.Collection: Dream
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.Collection: Cities
What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.Collection: Use
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.Collection: Rose
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.Collection: Book
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Truth
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Fate
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.Collection: Memories
Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.Collection: Men
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Sight
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.Collection: Dream
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.Collection: Mean
Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.Collection: Lying
Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.Collection: Sake
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.Collection: Past
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.Collection: Notebook
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.Collection: Bourgeoisie
Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.Collection: Rotten
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.Collection: Ignorance
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.Collection: Hands
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!Collection: Travel
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Time
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.Collection: Hierarchy
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Events
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.Collection: Might
[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!Collection: Beautiful
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.Collection: Memories
I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.Collection: Book
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.Collection: Distance
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.Collection: Attitude
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling bloodCollection: Blood
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.Collection: Life
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.Collection: Mountain
For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.Collection: Running
The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.Collection: Children
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.Collection: Real
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.Collection: Men
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.Collection: Emergencies
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.Collection: Race
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.Collection: Extremes
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.Collection: War
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.Collection: Running