I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Walter Benjamin

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one singl;e catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin

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

"The birth of the novel is the solitary individual... To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable extremes in the representation of human life" Walter Benjamin

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance. Walter Benjamin

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. Walter Benjamin

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. Walter Benjamin

A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twins about a happening like ivy around a wall Walter Benjamin

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

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

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate. Walter Benjamin

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. . . Walter Benjamin

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. Walter Benjamin

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

Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. Walter Benjamin

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

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need, can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn. Walter Benjamin

The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions. Walter Benjamin

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. Walter Benjamin

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his "competence." Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. Walter Benjamin

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. Walter Benjamin

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. Walter Benjamin

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. Walter Benjamin

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 Benjamin

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. Walter Benjamin

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

In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relation to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. Walter Benjamin

It adds to our understanding of capitalism as religion to realize that, to begin with, the first heathens certainly did not believe that religion served a "higher, "moral" interest but that it was severely practical. Walter Benjamin

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up. Walter Benjamin

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. Walter Benjamin

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. Walter Benjamin

When you are taken unawares by an outbreak fo fire or the news of a death, there is in the first mute shock a felling of guilt, the indistict reproach: did you realy know of this? Did not the dead person's name, the last time you uttered it, sound differently in your mouth? Do you see in the flames a sign from yesterday evening, in a language you only know understand? Walter Benjamin

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation. Walter Benjamin

Only the mass of inhabitants permits prostitution to spread over large parts of the city. And only the mass makes it possible for the sexual object to become intoxicated with the hundred stimuli which it produces. Walter Benjamin

...the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. ...To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility....but the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics. Walter Benjamin

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

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives. Walter Benjamin