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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
Experience
Instruments
Unmistakably
Past
Memory
Exploring
Earth
Theater
Plain
Made
Dead
Medium
Memories
Mediums
Cities
Buried
Lying
Instrument
Language
Theatre
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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