375 Quotes by Walter Benjamin

Languages are not strangers to on another.

Language communicates the linguistic being of things. The clearest manifestation of this being, however, is language itself. The answer to the question ‘ What does language communicate?’ is therefore ‘All language communicates itself.

To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use.

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.

God's transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated intohuman existence.

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

He who cannot take sides should keep silent.

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.