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One Way Street And Other Writings QUOTES

One Way Street And Other Writings QUOTES

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

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

2 " The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

3 " Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

4 " The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

5 " Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift in seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his memetic faculty does not play a decisive role. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

6 " All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

7 " What, in the end, makes advertisements superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

8 " to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

9 " In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland’s sadness. To that person, they remain faithful. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

10 " Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance? "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

11 " We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

12 " It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

13 " To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

14 " The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

15 " The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry’s language itself. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

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

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

17 " Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

18 " He who cannot take sides should keep silent. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

19 " The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by aeroplane. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings

20 " A child in his nightshirt cannot be prevailed upon to greet an arriving visitor. "

― Walter Benjamin , One Way Street And Other Writings