Quote

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

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
Giving
Older
Kill
Ceaselessly
Cause
Troubled
Worry
Worries
Causes
Tenderness
Everyone
Fears
Ends
Loves
Give
Inspire

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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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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.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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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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