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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.

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
Realm
Realms
Ruins
Thought
Things
Allegories
Allegory

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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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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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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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