Walter Benjamin

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

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

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.

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

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.

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.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

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.

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.

Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe