Walter Benjamin Quotes

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

History is written by the victors.

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

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.

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.