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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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
Human
Revolution
Brake
Humans
Perhaps
Grabbing
Different
Says
Marx
World
Quite
Emergency
Situation
Revolutions
Race
Emergencies
History
Ride
May
Train
Locomotives
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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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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.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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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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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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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 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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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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