Quote

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.

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
Ownership
Intimate
Objects
Relationship
Alive
Lives
Come

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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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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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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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