Walter Benjamin Quotes on Life
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 life, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Walter Benjamin:
“The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.”
-
“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”
p. 91 -
“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.”
Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 4 -
“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”
Jede Äußerung menschlichen Geisteslebens kann als eine Art der Sprache aufgefaßt werden, und diese Auffassung erschließt nach Art einer wahrhaften Methode überall neue Fragestellungen.