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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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
Rely
Unduly
Blow
Decisive
Lies
Complacency
Strength
Improvisation
Days
Blows
Lying
Competence
Left
Handed
Life
Struck
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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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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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Walter Benjamin
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin
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 experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
Walter Benjamin
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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