Walter Benjamin Quotes

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgement Day.

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

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.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

A curious paradox: people have only the narrowest private interest in mind when they act, yet they are at the same time more than ever determined in their behavior by the instincts of the mass. ... The diversity of individual goals is immaterial in face of the identity of the determining forces.

You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.

Man geht immer die gleichen Wege des Denkens wie vorher. Nur scheinen sie mit Rosen bestreut.

For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.

Mir schien: Ausgesprochene Unlust, mich über Dinge des praktischen Lebens, Zukunft, Daten, Politik zu unterhalten. Man ist an die intellektuelle Sphäre gebannt wie manchmal Besessene auf die sexuelle, ist von ihr angesaugt.

Criticism and prophecy must be the two categories that meet in the salvation of the past

Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority. ... Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.

Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth—that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.

Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. ... An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt.