Quote

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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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
Musical
Textile
Piece
Textiles
Pieces
Architectural
Levels
Proceeds
Three
Constructed
Writing
Composed
Work
Woven
Good
Finally

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
Walter Benjamin
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Walter Benjamin
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
Walter Benjamin
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
Walter Benjamin
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Walter Benjamin
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Walter Benjamin
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
Walter Benjamin
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
Walter Benjamin
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin