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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.

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
Moments
Opens
Past
Historian
May
Void
Heart
Mouth
Good
Brings
Mouths
Moment
Throbbing
Lost
Tidings

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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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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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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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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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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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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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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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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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