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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
Tell
Stories
Everything
Sanction
Sanctions
Borrowed
Storyteller
Authority
Death

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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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 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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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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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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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