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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
Dying
Side
Sides
Wisdom
Art
Ends
Truth
Epic
Reaching

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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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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 document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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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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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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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 illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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