Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. [...] 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.
Benjamin, Walter. Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting. 1931.
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
Benjamin, Walter. Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline. 1927-1943.
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness
Benjamin, Walter. Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline. 1927-1943.
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. 1932.
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1935.
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History. 1940.
The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.
Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History. 1940.
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History. 1940.
Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. 1927-1940.
History breaks down in images not into stories.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. 1927-1940.
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. 1927-1940.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
Benjamin, Walter. The Destructive Character. 1931.
Frofi the point of view of epic, existence is an ocean. Nothing is more epic than the sea.
Benjamin, Walter. The Crisis of The Novel. 1929.
You earn also sai! on the sea. For many purposes, or none at all. You can embark on a voyage and then, when you are far out, you can cruise with no land in sight, nothing but sea and sky. This is what the novelist does. He is the truly solitary, silent person.
Benjamin, Walter. The Crisis of The Novel. 1929.
What distinguishes the novel from all other forms of prose - folktale, saga, proverb, comie tale - is that it neither originates in the oral tradition nor flows back into it.
Benjamin, Walter. The Crisis of The Novel. 1929.
The radius of his life is no more than one thousand meters. Alexanderplatz governs his existence. A cruel regent, if you like. An absolute monarch.
Benjamin, Walter. The Crisis of The Novel. 1929.
This is the law governing the novel: scarcely has the hero discovered how to help himself than he ceases to be capable of helping us.
Benjamin, Walter. The Crisis of The Novel. 1929.
Since the transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly than that of the base, it has taken more than half a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1935.
In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. Objects made by humans could always be copied by humans. Replicas were made by pupils in practicing for their craft, by masters in disseminating their works, and, finally, by third parties in pursuit of profit. But the technological reproduction of artworks is something new.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1935.
In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art-its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence-and nothing else-that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1935.
The representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being's self-alienation.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1935.
Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to instal his power station on them.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. 1927-1930.
The know-alls who even today have not advanced beyond the ‘authentic origins’ of the movement, and even now have nothing to say about it except that yet another clique of literati is here mystifying the honourable public, are a little like a gathering of experts at a spring who, after lengthy deliberation, arrive at the conviction that this paltry stream will never drive turbines.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. 1927-1930.
But at the time when it broke over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral, conclusive, absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact was integrated. Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous flooding back and forth. Language only seemed itself where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called ‘meanings’. Image and language take precedence.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. 1927-1930.
Language takes precedence. Not only before meaning. Also before the self. In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. 1927-1930.
The trick by which this world of things is mastered—it is more proper to speak of a trick than a method—consists in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. 1927-1930.
At the centre of this world of things stands the most dreamed-of of their objects, the city of Paris itself.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. 1927-1930.
Not the existence but for the most part the meaning of the concrete realities in the work will no doubt be hidden from the poet and the public of his time.
Benjamin, Walter. Goethe’s Elective Affinities. 1924.
How clearly the most sublime spirits of the Enlightenment had a premonition of the content [Gehalt] or an insight into the matter [Sache], yet how incapable even they were of raising themselves to the perception of its material content [Sachgehalt], becomes compellingly clear with regard to marriage. It is marriage, as one of the most rigorous and objective articulations of the content of human life, that in Goethe's Elective Affinities attests, also for the first time, to the author's new meditation, turned toward the synthetic perception of the material contents.
Benjamin, Walter. Goethe’s Elective Affinities. 1924.
Of course, the philosopher made his gravest mistake when he supposed that from his definition of the nature of marriage, he could deduce its moral possibility, indeed its moral necessity, and in this way confirm its juridical reality.
Benjamin, Walter. Goethe’s Elective Affinities. 1924.
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)