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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

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
Giving
Honored
Prosaic
Time
Religions
Miserably
Intellect
Banal
Morality
Alms
Prove
Beggar
Holy
Proves
Principles
Inadequate
Matter
Consistency
Regenerative

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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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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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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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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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