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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

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
Spices
Genuine
Approach
Baby
Girl
Book
Polemics
Cannibal
Lovingly

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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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