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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

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
Learning
Future
Learn
Decipher
Illiterate
Photographs
Photograph

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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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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.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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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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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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