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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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
Dead
Feeling
Bearer
Death
Messenger
Feelings
Messengers
Makes
Realm
Reason
Realms
Important
Appears
Even
News
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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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 monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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