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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Made
Dead
Medium
Memories
Mediums
Cities
Buried
Lying
Instrument
Language
Theatre
Experience
Instruments
Unmistakably
Past
Memory
Exploring
Earth
Theater
Plain

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin