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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 experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Walter Benjamin
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Walter Benjamin
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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
Walter Benjamin
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
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.
Walter Benjamin
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
Walter Benjamin
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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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The work of memory collapses time.
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.
Walter Benjamin
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
Walter Benjamin
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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.
Walter Benjamin
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
Walter Benjamin
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Walter Benjamin
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
Walter Benjamin