Walter Benjamin

"There is no better bread than that earned by the sweat of your brow."

"Every phenomenon that strikes us as being new is a forgotten thing returning from the past."

"Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions."

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing and everything at once."

"Every act of thinking contains within it an element of violence against previous thinking."

"We cannot imagine how we might feel if all the strata of our past selves were somehow still present."

"The commodity is a mysterious thing, simply because a social relation becomes perceptible as a thing."

"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre."

"To know nothing is to understand all: is an old truism."

"The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world."

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

"Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which the mind of a man knows to be unjust."

"Every word is a prejudice."

"Thinking means going to the utmost limit of what is possible."

"The dialectic method is only a tool, not the truth itself."

"We must give up the illusion that the aim is to turn the individual into a different person, but to support him in becoming himself."

"Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still."

"The smallest cell of the political body is the family, and this is why family life is nothing else than the cell of society as a whole."

"Courage is found in unlikely places and in unlikely people."

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

"A revolutionary thinker is not one who thinks revolutionary thoughts, but one who thinks thoughts that are fundamentally opposed to the given world."

"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."

"To be radical means to make no concessions to the comfortable classes."

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned."

"The most powerful thing in the world is the human soul on fire."

"Melancholy is the saturnine side of satire."

"The beautiful is not opposed to the useful, but to the ugly."

"Every page I write is really poetry; even if the form is different."

"Eternity is not infinite time but the deepest present moment."