Quote

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
Already
Bare
Enemy
Assault
Antiquities
House
Ritual
Erected
Long
Bombs
Toll
Life
Lays
Tolls
Forgotten
Perverse
Foundation
Antiquity
Taking
Foundations

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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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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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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 every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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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 film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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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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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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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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