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

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
Walter Benjamin
Image
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
Walter Benjamin
Image
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
Image
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
Walter Benjamin
Image
I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
Walter Benjamin
Image
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
Image
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin