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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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