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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.

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
Men
Illiterate
Alphabet
Photograph
Future
Read
Cannot
Take

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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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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 only for those without hope that hope is given.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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.
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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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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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