All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

— Walter Benjamin

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

— Walter Benjamin

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a Philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

— Walter Benjamin

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

— Walter Benjamin

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

— Walter Benjamin

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

— Walter Benjamin

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

— Walter Benjamin

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

— Walter Benjamin

Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.

— Walter Benjamin

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.

— Walter Benjamin