Quote

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

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
Violence
Destroying
Mythic
Blood
Latter
Spilling
Law
Boundaries
Lethal
Power
Strikes
Retribution
Without
Guilt
Threatens
Former
Destroys
Brings
Bloody
Divine
Sets

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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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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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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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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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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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