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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

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
Hopeless
Sake
Ones
Hope
Given

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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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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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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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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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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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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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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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