Walter Benjamin quotes

" The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. " # Relationships # Love # Hope

" Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. " # Advice # Wisdom # Fiction

" Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. " # Debate # Books - Reading # Quarrels

" The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. " # Destructiveness # Character # Suicide

" He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest. " # Etiquette # Fashion # Dress

" 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. " # Experience # Beauty # Friends and Friendship

" The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions. " # Facts # Power # Life and Living

" Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received. " # Food and Eating # Friends and Friendship # Leaders and Leadership

" Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. " # Giving # Freedom # Power

" We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations. " # Life and Living # Enemies # Critics and Criticism