Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin’s cousin, Günther Anders.
Since the publication of Schriften, 15 years after his death, Benjamin’s work—especially the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has become of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines. In 1968, the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft was established by the German thinker, poet and artist Natias Neutert, as a free association of philosophers, writers, artists, media theoreticians and editors. They did not take Benjamin’s body of thought as a scholastic “closed architecture, but as one in which all doors, windows and roof hatches are widely open”, as the founder Neutert put it—more poetically than politically—in his manifesto. The members felt liberated to take Benjamin’s ideas as a welcome touchstone for social change. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look at a few of his great quotes:
On Life:
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form — it may be called fleeting or eternal — is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn — the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
On Death:
On Happiness:
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
On Love:
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
On Books:
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? … And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps – his tastes, his interest, his habits.
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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.
On History:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon 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 irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.