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

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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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