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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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
Giving
Honored
Prosaic
Time
Religions
Miserably
Intellect
Banal
Morality
Alms
Prove
Beggar
Holy
Proves
Principles
Inadequate
Matter
Consistency
Regenerative
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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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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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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