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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

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
Taught
Profundity
Experience
Bourgeois
Hierarchy
Contains
Communist
Communism
Contemporary
Meaning
Platitudes

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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.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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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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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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