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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
Indissolubly
Redemption
Bound
Bounds
Image
Happiness
Past

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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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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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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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