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

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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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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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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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