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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

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
Knowledge
Form
Human
Humans
Interpretation
Intelligence
Takes

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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.
Walter Benjamin
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter Benjamin
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
Walter Benjamin
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
Walter Benjamin
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Walter Benjamin
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
Walter Benjamin
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Walter Benjamin
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
Walter Benjamin
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
Walter Benjamin
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
Walter Benjamin
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin