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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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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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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.
Walter Benjamin