Walter Benjamin Quotes

• The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

  Walter Benjamin

• The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

  Walter Benjamin

• Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

  Walter Benjamin

• Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

  Walter Benjamin

• Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

  Walter Benjamin

• 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.

  Walter Benjamin

• Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

  Walter Benjamin

• It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

  Walter Benjamin

• It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

  Walter Benjamin

• He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

  Walter Benjamin

• Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

  Walter Benjamin

• Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

  Walter Benjamin

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

  Walter Benjamin

• Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

  Walter Benjamin

• All disgust is originally disgust at touching.

  Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (35)

Birth:	15th July, 1892
Death:	26th September, 1940
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Broadcaster, Critic, Essayist, Philosopher, Translator

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