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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

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
Realm
Realms
Ruins
Thought
Things
Allegories
Allegory

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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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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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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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