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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

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
Flow
Thoughts
Wells
Well
Thinking
Arrest
Involves

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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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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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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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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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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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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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