Quote

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Walter Benjamin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Cities
Veils
Crowd
Crowds
Landscape
Familiar
City
Phantasmagoria
Room
Beckons
Rooms
Veil

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

Image
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Walter Benjamin
Image
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Walter Benjamin
Image
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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
Image
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Walter Benjamin
Image
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
Walter Benjamin