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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
Time
Collapses
Collapse
Memory
Memories
Work

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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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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.
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