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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
Wisdom
Art
Ends
Truth
Epic
Reaching
Dying
Side
Sides

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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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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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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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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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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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