Quote

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

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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
Kill
Ceaselessly
Cause
Troubled
Worry
Worries
Causes
Tenderness
Everyone
Fears
Ends
Loves
Give
Inspire
Giving
Older

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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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