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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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
Coming
Forfeit
Asks
Submissive
Future
Inertia
Times
Exact
Forfeits
Anything
Inner
Intimation
May
Fortune
Tellers
Thousand
Unwittingly
Events
Dexterity
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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.
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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.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
Walter Benjamin
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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