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The Arcades Project QUOTES

The Arcades Project QUOTES

1 " As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

2 " Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

3 " Everything remembered, everything thought, all awareness becomes base, frame, pedestal, lock and key of his ownership. Period, region, craft, previous owners - all, for the true collector, merge in each one of his possessions into a magical encyclopaedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

4 " The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but
what in each case is given. Thus hell is not
something that awaits us, but this life here and now. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

5 " Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscape of the body... These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it still more deeply into the universe of matter. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

6 " For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of that which really concerns him. And that is precisely why the appearance of repetition doesn't exist for him in history; because the moments in the course of history which matter most to him become moments of the present through their index as "fore-history," and change their characteristics according to the catastrophic or triumphant determination of that present. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

7 " Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

8 " That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

9 " These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

10 " At the entrance, a mailbox: last opportunity to make some sign to the world one is leaving. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project

11 " The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial consideration to impinge on social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arises the phantasmagorias of the interior, which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His room is a box in the theater of the world. "

― Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project