Walter Benjamin Quotes

Many are the marvels of God's Creation, but none so marvelous as man. Or so cunning, for good and ill.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.

Every single answer starts with the phrase 'I don't know.' But most of the time she does know, if I give her the time and the space in which to answer.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Language is the light of the mind

Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That's what lies do.

Since you won't give me your names I'll call you Thing One and Thing Two.

Names govern the world.

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Conversation is the legs on which thought walks; and writing, the wings by which it flies.

We see only what we have names for.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

Every human being whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.

Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.

When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so. God is not a demiurge [demigod] or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities. Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.

Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's.

When you invent something, there will always be people to criticise. God's creation is full of critics, but has God given up His creation because of the critics?

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.

Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.

For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.