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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.

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
Life
Destruction
Worth
Trouble
Feeling
Lives
Living
Feelings
Destructive
Character
Suicide

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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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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 film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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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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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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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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