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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

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
Constellations
Translated
Objects
Stars
Ideas

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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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