Famous Quotes / Walter Benjamin
46 Quotations by Walter Benjamin
- 1. All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic an ...

- 2. Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but inform ...

- 3. Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

- 4. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him aw ...

- 5. Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

- 6. Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from de ...

- 7. Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightl ...

- 8. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

- 9. Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of ...

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

- 11. Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

- 12. He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events tha ...

- 13. He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no ...

- 14. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be ...

- 15. It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapabl ...

- 16. Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and proph ...

- 17. Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

- 18. Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experie ...

- 19. Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothin ...

- 20. Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it i ...
