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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
Authority
Death
Tell
Stories
Everything
Sanction
Sanctions
Borrowed
Storyteller

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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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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 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.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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