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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
Delay
Developed
Idea
Ideas
Writing
Surrendering

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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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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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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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