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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
Even
Monuments
Bourgeoisie
Monument
Commodity
Ruins
Recognize
Begin
Convulsions
Economy
Crumbled
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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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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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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