Walter Benjamin Quotes

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

When you wear that shirt with the five stars on the front you have to respect it.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.

It just makes so many other things insignificant. It is the most incredible thing that has happened to me, and I feel so lucky to have found the person I want to be with, and to be prepared and enthusiastic.

Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

But I want to feel like life matters. I had something real with you, but then the realness scared me. I decided to go for other things instead.

time is a tree (this life one leaf) but love is the sky and i am for you just so long and long enough

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

Love is the salt of life.

Everything in life is a metaphor.