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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
Habit
Taste
Books
Interest
Tell
Book
Tastes
Men
Habits
Keeps

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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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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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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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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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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 true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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