Walter Benjamin Quotes
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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.
It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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.
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.
The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.
There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.
What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.