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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.

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
Function
Transmitting
Information
Intends
Language
Hallmark
Cannot
Transmit
Anything
Translation
Something
Translations
Hence
Perform
Inessential

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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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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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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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