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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

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
Planet
Slowest
Planets
Delays
Revolution
Came
Saturn
Stars
Detours
World
Delay
Sign
Star

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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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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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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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