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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 only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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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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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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