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The work of memory collapses time.

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
Work
Time
Collapses
Collapse
Memory
Memories

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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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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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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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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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.
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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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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
Walter Benjamin
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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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
Walter Benjamin