Walter Benjamin Quotes

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

The work of memory collapses time.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.