Quote

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.

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
Boredom
Touched
Library
Books
Order
Unpacking
Book
Mild
Shelves

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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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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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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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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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