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

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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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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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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.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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