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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.
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
Concerned
Knowledge
Flashes
Comes
Afterward
Long
Thunder
Text
Flash
Rolling
Fields
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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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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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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