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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

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
Like
Memory
Begin
Creation
Rest
Memories
Week
Books
Preface
Book
Sunday

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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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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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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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