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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

Walter Benjamin

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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
Disgust
Originally
Disgusting
Touching

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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.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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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.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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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.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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.
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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.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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