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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.

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
Much
Proves
Borrower
Borrowed
Inveterate
Treasure
Borrowers
Prove
Collector
Failure
Fervor
Books
Guards
Read
Collectors
Book
Treasures

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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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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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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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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.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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