Walter Benjamin Ideas Quotations

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Tourism has affected Cuba, because tourists come and they bring racist, sexist ideas. They bring a whole vision that there are rich people all over the world and that's the way it should be.

We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.