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

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The work of memory collapses time.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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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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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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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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