Quote

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.

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
Life
Fine
Twenties
Fits
Like
Morning
Pick
Predictions
Four
Picks
Shirt
Incomparably
Hours
Bed
Waking
Prediction
Ability
Fit
Shirts
Tissue
Lying
Lies
Fresh
Tightly
Happiness
Depends
Perfectly
Tissues
Next
Pure
Twenty
Woven

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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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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.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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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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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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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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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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