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

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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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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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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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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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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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