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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

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
Hope
Given
Without

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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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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.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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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.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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