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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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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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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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