Walter Benjamin Quotes

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy, but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

History is the memory of things said and done.

Memory feeds imagination.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Power is knowing your past.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.