Walter Benjamin

"The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience."

"The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image."

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was'."

"Language is only a tool. The real and essential is the unsayable."

"Every morning, the day lies like fresh snow before our feet and asks us what we will do with it."

"The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees."

"Experience is a product of both action and interpretation."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence is an act of rebellion."

"To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright."

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear."

"It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."

"The work of the past on the present is more important than the work of the present on the past."

"A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition."

"The nature of technology is nothing technological."

"In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from the conformism threatening to overpower it."

"Ideas are objects. The object-character of thought becomes apparent in its historical survival."

"Fascism has its aesthetics. Against that, one must insist: that there is a politics of art."

"Art presupposes reality, and it presupposes the validity of one's response to reality."

"What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"The mediocre intelligence despises what is above it, and the powerful intelligence respects it."

"True prayer is the reaching out of the soul to an invisible something unseen, unfelt, and unheard, but the one who believes in it shall find the kingdom of God is within you."

"Whoever has emerged victorious is integrated into the procession which lumbers behind him."

"The angel of history must look the way he turns his face toward the past."

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the byproduct of other pursuits."

"All capitalism is the belief that making money is holy, and that more is better."

"In the world of the machine, every person is now a part of the human machinery that operates the machine itself."

"The authenticity of a tradition depends on its being transmitted as something inert."