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. - Walter Benjamin
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize how it really was. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. - Walter Benjamin
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. - Walter Benjamin
What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts. - Walter Benjamin
History is written by the victors. - Walter Benjamin
Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man. - Walter Benjamin
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. - Walter Benjamin
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. - Walter Benjamin
Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness. - Walter Benjamin
The work of memory collapses time. - Walter Benjamin
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. - Walter Benjamin
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them. - Walter Benjamin