Walter Benjamin on Thinking

"Everything is thought [gebacht]. The task is to make a stopover at every one of these many little thoughts. To spend the night in a thought. Once I have done that, I know something about it that its originator never dreamed of." Walter Benjamin, Fragment written ca. June 1928. Gesammelte Schriften, VI, 200. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

If one merely stops-over at this thought one will have the key to thinking! 

One does not need to read fast in order to learn or develop a critical mind, one merely needs to think about what they read... one merely needs to think! (this is the opposite of simply passing over something casually). Man's failure to do this is a manifestation of his stupidity. However, the first thing one learns when they "stopover" is that not all thoughts contain enough substance to make for a quality night. Not all thinkers are worth the application of thought. The key is to spend one's life in the company of quality thinkers who create quality thoughts. Once we know how to think, the next task is to seek out quality thoughts. The task of a thinker is to strive to be a quality thinker by valuing and confiding in other quality thoughts and thinkers. He that would be a quality thinker must learn to ask quality questions, he must learn to discriminate against all things including himself. There is more to a quality thinker's thought than what appears on the shallow surface. He that has learned to think knows how to penetrate the deep. One does not have to work so hard to communicate with him who knows how to penetrate the deep. Some thinker's thoughts are like a labyrinth, inexhaustible in new discoveries. There are wells that will never dry up just so long as one knows how to draw from their depths.      

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