Quote

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.

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
Doe
Forest
Find
Forests
Mean
Requires
Much
City
Way
Lose
Cities
Loses
Around
Schooling

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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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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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