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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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
Time
Barbarism
Document
Documents
Civilization
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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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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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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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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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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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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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