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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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
Memories
Passion
Every
Collector
Collectors
Chaotic
Borders
Chaos
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
Walter Benjamin
Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
Walter Benjamin
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Walter Benjamin
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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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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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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