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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
Gifts
Shock
Point
Must
Giving
Receiver
Affect

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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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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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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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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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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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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 monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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.
Walter Benjamin