Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
― Walter Benjamin

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The true sign of decadence is not the collusion of the university and the state, but the theory and guarantee of academic freedom, when in reality people assume with brutal simplicity that the aim of study is to steer its disciples to a socially conceived individuality.
― Walter Benjamin

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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 single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
― Walter Benjamin

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Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
― Walter Benjamin

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Im Kapitalismus ist eine Religion zu erblicken, d.h. der Kapitalismus dient essentiell der Befriedigung derselben Sorgen, Qualen, Unruhen, auf die ehemals die so genannten Religionen Antwort gaben.
― Walter Benjamin

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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
― Walter Benjamin

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There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
― Walter Benjamin

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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
― Walter Benjamin

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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
― Walter Benjamin

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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
― Walter Benjamin

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