{"author":"Walter Benjamin","author_id":"Walter+Benjamin","total_quotes":44,"quotes":[{"text":"The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["fairy-tales"],"id":7247,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["forgetting","memory"],"id":10163,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["books","library","reading"],"id":15167,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["aesthetics","art","poltics","propaganda","war"],"id":22771,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["history","memory","past"],"id":29835,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"History is written by the victors.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["history"],"id":41525,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["wisdom","art","end "],"id":67432,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["art","critical-theory","experience","life","marxism"],"id":87215,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["prose"],"id":97321,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["boredom","listening","relaxation","storytelling"],"id":104129,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":44,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}