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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
Receiver
Affect
Gifts
Shock
Point
Must
Giving

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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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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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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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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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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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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 adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin