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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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
Dresses
Objects
Lying
Someone
Vest
Like
Observes
Vests
Etiquette
Wears
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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