The illiterate of the future’, it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph’. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?

— Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.

— Walter Benjamin

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

— Walter Benjamin

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

— Walter Benjamin

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.

— Walter Benjamin

The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.

— Walter Benjamin

Inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content.

— Walter Benjamin

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

— Walter Benjamin

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder.

— Walter Benjamin

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift in seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his memetic faculty does not play a decisive role.

— Walter Benjamin

The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry’s language itself.

— Walter Benjamin

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by aeroplane.

— Walter Benjamin

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected.

— Walter Benjamin

To do justice to the figure of Kafka it its purity and peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing; it is the purity and beauty of failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable that the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.

— Walter Benjamin

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.

— Walter Benjamin

The weightiest objection to the mode of life of the confirmed bachelor: he eats by himself. Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse – it is only in company that eating is done justice.

— Walter Benjamin

History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.

— Walter Benjamin

A cronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history, To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has past become citable in all its moments.

— Walter Benjamin

The illiterate of the future’, it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph’. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?

— Walter Benjamin

If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.

— Walter Benjamin

The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

— Walter Benjamin
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