1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin photo

Walter Benjamin Quotes

Total quotes: 8
“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, One-Way Street
“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”
— Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
“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.”
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Tagged: Writers, Why You Write Books
“For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that there lives have been given back to them.”
— Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Tagged: Part and Parcel, All Connected, Connectionism, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“The Latin word textum means 'web.'”
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Tagged: Word Orgins, Understanding the Web
“We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection.”
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Tagged: Narrative Fallacy, The Beauty of Narrative, How Memory Works, The Fiction of Living
“In relation to the history of organic life on earth,” writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.”
— Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Tagged: Time, How Time Really Is, Time As Felt Outside of Humans, Geological Time
loading next page...