Quote

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

Walter Benjamin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Touched
Library
Books
Order
Book
Unpacking
Mild
Shelves
Boredom

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

Image
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Walter Benjamin
Image
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
Walter Benjamin
Image
To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Walter Benjamin
Image
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
Walter Benjamin
Image
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
Image
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
Walter Benjamin
Image
We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Walter Benjamin