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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

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
Truth
Epic
Reaching
Dying
Side
Sides
Wisdom
Art
Ends

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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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 present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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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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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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