Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collectors passion borders on the chaos of memories. – Walter Benjamin
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. – Walter Benjamin
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. – Walter Benjamin
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation. – Walter Benjamin
Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance. – Walter Benjamin
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. – Walter Benjamin
The book borrower…proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures…as by his failure to read these books. – Walter Benjamin
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity. – Walter Benjamin
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. – Walter Benjamin
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate. – 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
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. – 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
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest. – Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. – Walter Benjamin
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction. – Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright. – Walter Benjamin
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. – Walter Benjamin
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions. – Walter Benjamin
