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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
Justice
Peculiar
Beauty
Purity
Must
Figure
Thing
Sight
Never
Figures
Failure
Lose
Loses
Kafka

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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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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 experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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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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