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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.

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

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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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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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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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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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