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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

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
Must
Giving
Receiver
Affect
Gifts
Shock
Point

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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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