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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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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 film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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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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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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 construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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