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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

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
Introducing
Unconscious
Impulse
Camera
Optics
Cameras
Introduces
Photography
Unconsciousness
Doe
Psychoanalysis
Impulses

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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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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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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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