Walter Benjamin Quotes

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

Historical awareness is a kind of resurrection.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

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

The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us.

The mind loves whatever repeats a pleasurable experience from the past. "I love this" basically means "I love repeating what felt so good before".

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?