There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter BenjaminEvery passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter BenjaminStichwörter: philosophy
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Walter BenjaminEvery 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 BenjaminStichwörter: storytelling
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...
Stichwörter: destructive-character
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. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood -- it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation -- which these books arouse in a genuine collector.
Walter BenjaminStichwörter: illuminations
The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
Walter BenjaminStichwörter: unpacking-my-library
Es bringt uns nämlich nicht weiter, die rätselhafte Seite am Rätselhaften pathetisch oder fanatisch zu unterstreichen; vielmehr durchdringen wir das Geheimnis nur in dem Grade, als wir es im Alltäglichen wiederfinden, kraft einer dialektischen Optik, die das Alltägliche als undurchdringlich, das Undurchdringliche als alltäglich erkennt...
Walter BenjaminThe only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Walter BenjaminStichwörter: history
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
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