top of page
Exlpore more Books quotes

"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."

"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."

"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."

"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."

"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."

"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by Walter Benjamin

"The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception."

"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."

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

"Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know."

"The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion."

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

"Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation."
bottom of page