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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

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
Balancing
Extreme
Extremes
Balance
Order
Precariousness

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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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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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.
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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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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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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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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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