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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

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
Like
Wayside
Relieve
Robbers
Quotations
Armed
Leap
Conviction
Stroller
Work
Strollers

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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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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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Walter Benjamin
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Walter Benjamin
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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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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.
Walter Benjamin
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Walter Benjamin