WALTER BENJAMIN QUOTES II

German Jewish philosopher (1892-1940)

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.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Theses on the Philosophy of History


The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Illuminations

Tags: photography


A religion may be discerned in capitalism--that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Capitalism as Religion


We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Reflections


For in reality there exists a fundamental identity between the word that, after the promise of the snake, knows good and evil, and the externally communicating word. The knowledge of things resides in name, whereas that of good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word, "prattle," and knows only one purification and elevation, to which the prattling man, the sinner, was therefore submitted: judgment.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Reflections


Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Illuminations

Tags: wisdom


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.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Selected Writings


Of all beings man is the only one who himself names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Reflections


Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

WALTER BENJAMIN

One-Way Street


Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline


Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

WALTER BENJAMIN

One-Way Street


Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics.

WALTER BENJAMIN

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction


And we speak of the sexualization of the spirit: this is the morality of the prostitute. She represents culture in Eros; Eros, who is the most powerful individualist, the most hostile to culture--even he can be perverted; even he can serve culture.

WALTER BENJAMIN

letter to Herbert Belmore, June 23, 1913


The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

WALTER BENJAMIN

"The Destructive Character", Frankfurter Zeitung, November 20, 1931


The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Selected Writings

Tags: progress


Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Selected Writings


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.

WALTER BENJAMIN

One-Way Street


To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

WALTER BENJAMIN

One-Way Street

Tags: happiness


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.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Theses on the Philosophy of History


All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.

WALTER BENJAMIN

The Task of the Translator