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

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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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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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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 film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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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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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin