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Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes

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Famous Walter Benjamin Quotes

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”

Has BeensWholePastFacesGrowsProgressViolenceFeetFrontsEventsAngelWingsHistoricalCaughtStormChainsParadiseCatastropheDebrisWreckageChain Of Events
Author:Walter Benjamin
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“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.”

MenRealMatterEarthPastTurnsUnderstandingRoomsReturnApproachTreasureSoilYieldBuriedAssociationAgain And AgainSelf KnowledgeFragmentsExaminationGalleryDiggingCollectorsDepositsMeticulousTorso
Author:Walter Benjamin
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“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.”

IfsYearsMayMadeMomentsFormLife IsStuffSpaceTalkingCasesStrangeMonthsAmountEternalFlowAutobiographyFleetingSequenceRecollectionHere I AmDiscontinuity
Author:Walter Benjamin
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“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.”

WayWellsMayDifferentNamesSpeakLosesCitiesFeetStreetsIgnoranceOneselfBarsForestsRoofSchoolingCity LifeWanderersTwigsCities At Night
Book:Selected Writings: 1927-1934
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“Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.”

IfsWellsHardReasonDoneJusticeCompanyFoodEatingDietsDividedAccustomedCoarseHermitsFrugal
Book:Selected Writings: 1913-1926
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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.”

MenMayHandsAsksFateEventsHe ManThousandLaysFortuneCuriosityApathyProphecyInertiaSubmissiveForfeitDexterityFortune Teller
Book:Selected Writings: 1913-1926
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