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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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
Taste
Books
Interest
Tell
Book
Tastes
Men
Habits
Keeps
Habit
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
Walter Benjamin
Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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.
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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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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 book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
