375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

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

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

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

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.

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies.