Walter Benjamin Quotes

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

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

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.