Quote

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.

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
Thought
Photograph
Abruptly
Truth
Committed
Startled
Music
Cry
Immersion
Nothing
Cases
Poorer
Self
Wants
Stroke
Writing
Help
Cries
Even
Whether
Strokes
Helping
Expressed
Uproar

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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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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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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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