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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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
Little
Tells
Literature
Understand
Littles
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
Walter Benjamin
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Walter Benjamin
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Walter Benjamin
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
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
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Walter Benjamin
Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Walter Benjamin
The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
Walter Benjamin
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
In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
Walter Benjamin
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
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
Walter Benjamin
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Walter Benjamin
What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
Walter Benjamin
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Walter Benjamin
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Walter Benjamin
