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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.

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
Glosses
Memory
Ultraviolet
Memories
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Invisibly
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Gloss
Men
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Life
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More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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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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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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