Walter Benjamin Quotes on Knowledge
Walter Benjamin was an early 20th-century German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, whose work has become one of the most studied bodies of writing in the history of cultural criticism. This page collects quotes attributed to Walter Benjamin on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein. -
Attributed to Walter Benjamin:
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”
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Attributed to Walter Benjamin:
“Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought.”
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“Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 4-5”
Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the " dreams of his youth." ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit , calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth. -
“Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 4”
Because he never raises his eyes to the great and the meaningful, the philistine has taken experience as his gospel. It has become for him a message about life's commonness. But he has never grasped that there exists something other than experience, that there are values—inexperienceable—which we serve. -
“The Metaphysics of Youth," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 10-11”
In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. ... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranqui -
“Jede Äußerung menschlichen Geisteslebens kann als eine Art der Sprache aufgefaßt werden, und diese Auffassung erschließt nach Art einer wahrhaften Methode überall neue Fragestellungen.”
Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 62 -
“The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 72”
Zur Verknechtung der Sprache im Geschwätz tritt die Verknechtung der Dinge in der Narretei fast als deren unausbleibliche Folge . -
“I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.”
Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline (1927-1934, English translation 1997)