375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns.

...the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience’ .

We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.