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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
Developed
Idea
Ideas
Writing
Surrendering
Delay

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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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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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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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