Walter Benjamin Quotes

Marlo taught me things I thought I knew.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

Experience is that marvelous thing that enable you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Night is the mother of counsels.

Ignorant men don't know what good they hold in their hands until they've flung it away.

There are some things I wish I never knew, but I am grateful for things that I have learned, too.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Mistakes were made, so I learned by my mistakes.

It's funny: 'Next Thing' was written in a time of my life when I was actually really naive and thought that I was wise.

As an individual, I've learnt a lot about life - some things that proved to be helpful and some things I wish I never knew.

My dad always made sense. My dad was only wrong when I didn't understand him. Had I listened to him, my life would have been so much easier.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?

Seeing the Way is like going into a dark room with a torch; the darkness instantly departs, while the light alone remains. When the Way is attained and the truth is seen, ignorance vanishes and enlightenment abides forever.

You don't have to be in "Who's Who" to know what's what.

What we do not understand we do not possess.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

I do not know everything; still many things I understand.

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

You can't discover light, by analyzing the dark.

You can't recover from what you do not understand.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

The more we see, the more we understand. The more we understand, the easier it is for us to have compassion and love. Understanding is the source of love. Understanding is love itself. Understanding is another name for love; love is another name for understanding.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.