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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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
Facts
Preserving
Book
Collectors
Collect
Preserve
Preserves
Books
Belief
Fact
Collector
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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.
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
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
The work of memory collapses time.
Walter Benjamin
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Walter Benjamin
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
Walter Benjamin
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Walter Benjamin
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
Walter Benjamin
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter Benjamin
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
Walter Benjamin
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
Walter Benjamin
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
Walter Benjamin
