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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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
Distracted
Habits
Habit
Form
Persons
Person
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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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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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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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.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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