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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

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
Love
Solitary
Lover
Appears
Lovers
Loved
Dream
Always

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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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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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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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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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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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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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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