Walter Benjamin

“It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are referred exclusively to man. One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also refer to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.”

“This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. 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. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.”

“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.”

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

“All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”

“Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.”

“The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.”

“Man's gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.”

“Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.”

“And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?”

“Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.”

“In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.”

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”

“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions.”

“In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.”

“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.”

“A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader(For even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener.) In this solitude of his, the reader ofa novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace. The suspense which permeates the novel isvery much like the draft which stimulates the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its play.”

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”

“What, in the end, makes advertisements superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.”

“Es bringt uns nämlich nicht weiter, die rätselhafte Seite am Rätselhaften pathetisch oder fanatisch zu unterstreichen; vielmehr durchdringen wir das Geheimnis nur in dem Grade, als wir es im Alltäglichen wiederfinden, kraft einer dialektischen Optik, die das Alltägliche als undurchdringlich, das Undurchdringliche als alltäglich erkennt...”

“What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.”

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

“Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.”

“Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.”

“All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”

“The work of memory collapses time.”

“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”

“The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.”

“I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”

“Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.”

“You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.”

“Recordar lo que para mí han sido los primero libros me exige olvidar desde el principio todo lo que sé de libros. Ciertamente toda mi actual sabiduría se basa en la disposición con la que ya entonces me enfrentaba al libro. Pero así como en el día de hoy tema y contenido, objeto y materia, se enfrentan al libro como algo exterior, entonces se encontraba todo fundido en él, no era algo independiente de él. El mundo abierto en el libro y el libro mismo no podían separarse bajo ningún concepto: formaban un todo perfecto. De esta forma, junto al libro, también podían cogerse con la mano su contenido, su mundo, como si tuvieran asas. Y este mundo, el contenido, glorificaban a su vez al libro en todas sus partes: palpitando en él, iluminado desde él. Y no sólo anidaban en la portada o en los grabados. Su casa estaba también en los títulos de los capítulos, en las letras especiales con que empezaban, en los puntos y aparte, en las columnas, etc. Los libros no se leían sin más, no; se vivían, se moraba entre sus líneas...”

“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. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood -- it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation -- which these books arouse in a genuine collector.”

“As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.”

“Languages are not strangers to on another.”

“We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.”

“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.”

“The distracted person, too, can form habits.”

“همچون کسی که در کشتی شکسته‌ای از تیرکی در حال سقوط آویزان است. شاید اما از آنجا نشانه‌ای به رهایی باز یابد.”

“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”

“Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.”

“The book borrower… proves himself to be an in venerate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures… as by his failure to read these books. ”

“Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...”

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”

“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.”