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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

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
Given
Without
Hope

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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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