Walter Benjamin Quotes

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

I watched the way you watch when you know you want to remember.

Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life - reality.

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I loved so well.

I'll note you in my book of memory.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.

You don't have to gaze into a crystal ball when you can read an open book.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

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

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

I will rememeber you. Will you remember me? Don't let your life pass you by and don't forget all your memories.

How vast a memory has Love!

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on memory alone.

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

To learn is to incur surprise-I mean really learning, not just refreshing our memory or adding a new fact. And to invent is to bestow surprise-I mean really inventing, not just innovating what others have done.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper. She lived.