Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven. Walter Benjamin More Quotes by Walter Benjamin More Quotes From Walter Benjamin Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past. Walter Benjamin bounds redemption Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. Walter Benjamin kitsch teach art You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits. Walter Benjamin taste men book All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. Walter Benjamin great-work genre literature Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn. Walter Benjamin block beautiful past Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. Walter Benjamin boredom eggs dream Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. Walter Benjamin passion borders memories This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin angel wings past 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 perception reality thinking To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. Walter Benjamin shelves true-freedom book I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. Walter Benjamin delay stars world In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. Walter Benjamin cases reader men He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. Walter Benjamin real men past Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Walter Benjamin cities doe mean Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Walter Benjamin reading writing book Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. Walter Benjamin extremes balance order 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 machines oil doe Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up. Walter Benjamin morning life lying In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward. Walter Benjamin rolling fields long Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. Walter Benjamin ownership alive intimate-relationships
