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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.

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
Picture
Seen
Flits
True
Flashes
Past
Seized
Never
Flash
Time
Recognized
Instant
Image

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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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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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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 only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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 killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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