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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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
Image
Happiness
Past
Indissolubly
Redemption
Bound
Bounds
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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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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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