Quote

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.

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
Beautiful
Lived
Compulsion
Hewn
Past
View
Limbs
Transit
Best
Views
Yield
Comparable
Nothing
Present
Abortion
Sprung
Need
Full
Precious
Yields
Must
Future
Block
Statue
Needs
Use
Image
Knocked
Experience
Advantage
Statues

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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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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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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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