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

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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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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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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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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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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