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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
Robbers
Quotations
Armed
Leap
Conviction
Stroller
Work
Strollers
Like
Wayside
Relieve

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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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.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
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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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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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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
Walter Benjamin
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Walter Benjamin
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
Walter Benjamin