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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

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
Write
Book
Writing
Really
Praiseworthy
Like
Dissatisfied
People
Writers
Books
Poor

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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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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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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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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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