Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that ownership fosters a deep emotional connection with objects, wherein a person becomes intertwined with the essence of what they own.
Walter Benjamin's quote emphasizes the profound connection people develop with their possessions. He posits that ownership transcends mere acquisition; rather, it forms a bond where the owner becomes deeply embedded in the identity and meaning of the objects they possess. This relationship transforms the owner's existence, highlighting that through the act of ownership, individuals ascribe personal significance to material things, suggesting a shared existence between the person and their belongings.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about consumerism, one might say, 'As Walter Benjamin reminds us, ownership can create deep connections with objects.'
More from Walter Benjamin
All quotes →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.
Similar quotes
Man is nothing: he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him to will and to do his good pleasure.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin.
Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.
Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.
Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws.