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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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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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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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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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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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[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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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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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