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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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
Without
Aware
Oneself
Awareness
Happiness
Happy
Fear
Become
Able
Fright
More quotes by 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
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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
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
[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
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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
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
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Walter Benjamin
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
