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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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
Shelves
Somewhere
Books
Freedom
True
Book
Collector
Collectors
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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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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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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The work of memory collapses time.
Walter Benjamin
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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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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.
Walter Benjamin