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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.

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
Always
Closest
Intimate
Receive
Ready
Devotedly
Share
Privately
Friends
Loudly
Important
Proclaim
Thing
Confession

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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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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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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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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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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.
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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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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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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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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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