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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
Hope
Given
Without

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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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