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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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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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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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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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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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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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