Quote

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

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
Ideas
Writing
Copying
Never
Fill
Already
Inspiration
Stop
Written
Running

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

Image
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Walter Benjamin
Image
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin
Image
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.
Walter Benjamin
Image
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
Walter Benjamin
Image
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Walter Benjamin
Image
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
Walter Benjamin
Image
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The work of memory collapses time.
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
Image
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
Walter Benjamin
Image
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin
Image
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin
Image
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
Walter Benjamin
Image
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin