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
Book
Unpacking
Mild
Shelves

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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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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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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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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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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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