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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

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
Eggs
Boredom
Bored
Leaves
Bird
Hatches
Experience
Rustling
Away
Bores
Dream
Drives

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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 camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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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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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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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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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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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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