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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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
Must
Catastrophe
Things
Grounded
Status
Concept
Concepts
Progress
Idea
Ideas
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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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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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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