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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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
Beggar
Myth
Around
Stills
Still
Long
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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
Walter Benjamin
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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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.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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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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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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