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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
Writing
Really
Praiseworthy
Like
Dissatisfied
People
Writers
Books
Poor
Write
Book

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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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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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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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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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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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