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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

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
Travel
Cities
Books
Book
Undertook
Many
Marches
Revealed
March
Pursuit

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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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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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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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