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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.

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
Construction
Conviction
Present
Facts
Power
Life
Convictions

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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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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 order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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