Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. – 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
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
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. – Walter Benjamin