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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
Precariousness
Balancing
Extreme
Extremes
Balance
Order

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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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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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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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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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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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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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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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