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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
Still
Long
Beggar
Myth
Around
Stills

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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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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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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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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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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 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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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.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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