Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Cities
Buried
Lying
Instrument
Language
Theatre
Experience
Instruments
Unmistakably
Past
Memory
Exploring
Earth
Theater
Plain
Made
Dead
Medium
Memories
Mediums
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
Walter Benjamin
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin
The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter Benjamin
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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
All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Walter Benjamin
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Walter Benjamin
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin
