Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related by law to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth15 July 1892
CountryGermany
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.