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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
Human
Humans
Interpretation
Intelligence
Takes
Knowledge
Form

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
Walter Benjamin
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Walter Benjamin
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
Walter Benjamin
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
Walter Benjamin
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
Walter Benjamin
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
Walter Benjamin
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
Walter Benjamin
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
Walter Benjamin
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
Walter Benjamin
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin