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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

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
Borrowed
Storyteller
Authority
Death
Tell
Stories
Everything
Sanction
Sanctions

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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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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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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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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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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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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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