Quote

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

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
Constant
Compounds
Products
Countless
Strange
Purely
Individual
Uncertain
Everything
Changing
Something
Forms
Mingles
Never
Forgotten
Prehistoric
World
Flow
Yielding

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[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!
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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