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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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
Blow
Left
Lefties
Decisive
Complacency
Improvisation
Blows
Handed
Struck
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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