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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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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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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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[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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