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

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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.
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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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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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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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