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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

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
Oneself
Ways
Books
Reading
Praiseworthy
Book
Acquiring
Writing
Dissatisfied
Way
Regarded
Method

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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 book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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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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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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.
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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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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.
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