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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

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
Pass
Authority
Keep
Incognito
Thought
Authorities
Strictly
Notebook
Register
Aliens

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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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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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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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