375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.

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.

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.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners - all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.

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