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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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
Interpretation
Intelligence
Takes
Knowledge
Form
Human
Humans

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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 destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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