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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

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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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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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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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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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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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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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.
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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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