Quote

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

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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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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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