Quote

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Walter Benjamin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Mediums
Memories
Buried
Cities
Instrument
Lying
Theatre
Language
Instruments
Unmistakably
Experience
Memory
Exploring
Past
Theater
Plain
Earth
Medium
Made
Dead

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

Image
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
Image
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The work of memory collapses time.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
Image
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Walter Benjamin