Quote

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.

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
Existence
Joints
Social
Oil
Doe
Hidden
Littles
Opinions
Little
Vast
Turbines
Machine
Apparatus
Machines
Applies
Opinion
Pour

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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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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.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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 nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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