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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.
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
Race
Emergencies
History
Ride
May
Train
Locomotives
Human
Revolution
Brake
Humans
Perhaps
Grabbing
Different
Says
Marx
World
Quite
Emergency
Situation
Revolutions
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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