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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
Collapse
Memory
Memories
Work
Time
Collapses

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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 distracted person, too, can form habits.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin