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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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
Listener
Symphony
Listeners
Intended
Poem
Picture
Reader
Beholder
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Walter Benjamin
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
Walter Benjamin
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Walter Benjamin
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
The distracted person, too, can form habits.
Walter Benjamin
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
Walter Benjamin
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Walter Benjamin
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin
A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
Walter Benjamin
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Walter Benjamin
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Walter Benjamin
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Walter Benjamin
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
Walter Benjamin
