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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.
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
Ruins
Recognize
Begin
Convulsions
Economy
Crumbled
Even
Monuments
Bourgeoisie
Monument
Commodity
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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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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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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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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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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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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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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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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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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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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