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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

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
Men
Habits
Keeps
Habit
Taste
Books
Interest
Tell
Book
Tastes

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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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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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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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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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