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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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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.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Walter Benjamin
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Walter Benjamin
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
Walter Benjamin
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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
Walter Benjamin
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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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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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.
Walter Benjamin
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Walter Benjamin
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter Benjamin
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
Walter Benjamin