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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.

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
Models
Entire
Mankind
Messianic
Present
Coincides
Universe
Comprises
History
Stature
Time
Model
Enormous

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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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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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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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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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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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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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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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