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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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
Thing
Sight
Never
Figures
Failure
Lose
Loses
Kafka
Justice
Peculiar
Beauty
Purity
Must
Figure
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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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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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter Benjamin
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin