Quote

Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.

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
Way
Lose
Cities
Loses
Around
Schooling
Doe
Forest
Find
Forests
Mean
Requires
Much
City

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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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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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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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