Walter Benjamin Quotes

Biography: Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic known for... more Biography: Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic known for his essays on literature, art, and history. Born in 1892, his work blends elements of Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and critical theory. Key works include "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History." He died in 1940. less

"As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.""All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation""All great literature either founds a genre or dissolves one""Every epoch dreams its successor""It is more difficult to honor the memory of the nameless""You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps""Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.""The man who cannot take sides must keep silent.""The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope""The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes""The more perfect the work of art, the more it depends on chance in its existence ""Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell ""To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return ""The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out ""This enemy who attacks us at an unknown hour and steals our death when we are not yet detached from life — this enemy is a mouse.""For the sake of knowledge and a better-informed public, it is necessary to celebrate a cult of the book, even and especially in these times of the book's accelerated commodification.""Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.""Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite a different schooling.""The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.""The truth must be touched in the way snakes are touched, with a stick."

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