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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
Quotations
Armed
Leap
Conviction
Stroller
Work
Strollers
Like
Wayside
Relieve
Robbers

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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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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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
Walter Benjamin
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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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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
Walter Benjamin
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin