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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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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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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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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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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 camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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