110+ Walter Benjamin Quotes On Art, History And Photography

Walter Benjamin was a German literary critic, philosopher, and essayist. He is best known for his work in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism, and cultural history. His work has had a lasting influence on literary and cultural studies, as well as on contemporary thought in general. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Walter Benjamin on art, history, photography.

Top 10 Walter Benjamin Quotes

1. Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
2. To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
3. Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
4. Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
5. 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.
6. Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
7. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
8. The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
9. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
10. All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Walter Benjamin Short Quotes

• Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
• Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
• Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
• Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
• Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
• Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
• Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
• In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
• Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
• To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Walter Benjamin Quotes About Art

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. — Walter Benjamin

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man. — Walter Benjamin

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion. — Walter Benjamin

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. — Walter Benjamin

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

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. — Walter Benjamin

In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. — Walter Benjamin

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. — Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes About History

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well — Walter Benjamin

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake. — Walter Benjamin

History breaks down into images, not into stories. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes About Life

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. — Walter Benjamin

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up. — Walter Benjamin

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. — Walter Benjamin

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. — Walter Benjamin

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions. — Walter Benjamin

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

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes About Experience

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. — Walter Benjamin

The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death. — Walter Benjamin

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes About Past

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. — Walter Benjamin

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. — Walter Benjamin

The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. — Walter Benjamin

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. — Walter Benjamin

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

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably. — Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes About Public

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed. — Walter Benjamin

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. — Walter Benjamin

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments. — Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Walter Benjamin

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. — Walter Benjamin

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn. — Walter Benjamin

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest. — Walter Benjamin

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. — Walter Benjamin

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven. — Walter Benjamin

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. — Walter Benjamin

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. — Walter Benjamin

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing. — Walter Benjamin

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. — Walter Benjamin

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception. — Walter Benjamin

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation. — Walter Benjamin

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

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. — Walter Benjamin

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. — Walter Benjamin

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

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate. — Walter Benjamin

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. — Walter Benjamin

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation. — Walter Benjamin

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

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

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

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood — Walter Benjamin

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. — Walter Benjamin

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value. — Walter Benjamin

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. — Walter Benjamin

[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful! — Walter Benjamin

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

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. — Walter Benjamin

It is only for those without hope that hope is given. — Walter Benjamin

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books! — Walter Benjamin

A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead. — Walter Benjamin

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. — Walter Benjamin

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition. — Walter Benjamin

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. — Walter Benjamin

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth. — Walter Benjamin

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. — Walter Benjamin

A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere. — Walter Benjamin

Literature tells very little to those who understand it. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up. — Walter Benjamin

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. — Walter Benjamin

I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain. — Walter Benjamin

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. — Walter Benjamin

A real translation is transparent. — Walter Benjamin

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. — Walter Benjamin

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

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. — Walter Benjamin

For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter. — Walter Benjamin

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room. — Walter Benjamin

The distracted person, too, can form habits. — Walter Benjamin

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. — Walter Benjamin

Life Lessons by Walter Benjamin

1. Walter Benjamin taught us to be critical of the status quo and to question the accepted norms of society. He also encouraged us to think deeply about our own lives and to be mindful of the impact of our actions on the world around us. Finally, he reminded us that life is a journey and that we should take the time to appreciate the beauty of the present moment.