Quote

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

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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
World
Flow
Yielding
Constant
Compounds
Products
Countless
Strange
Purely
Individual
Uncertain
Everything
Changing
Something
Forms
Mingles
Never
Forgotten
Prehistoric

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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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 experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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