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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

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
Judging
Judgment
Opinion
Public
Interest
Matter
Judgments
Opinions
Private

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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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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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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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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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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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