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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

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
Writing
Surrendering
Delay
Developed
Idea
Ideas

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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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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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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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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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