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

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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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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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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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