Walter Benjamin

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.

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

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

The true picture of the past flits by. 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.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

All disgust is originally disgust at touching.