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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.
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
Enemy
Assault
Antiquities
House
Ritual
Erected
Long
Bombs
Toll
Life
Lays
Tolls
Forgotten
Perverse
Foundation
Antiquity
Taking
Foundations
Already
Bare
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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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 be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin
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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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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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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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Walter Benjamin
