All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Walter Benjamin

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Walter Benjamin

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin

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

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter Benjamin

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

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Walter Benjamin

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


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

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

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Walter Benjamin

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

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

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