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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.

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
Mountain
Would
Like
Metamorphose
Mouse
Mice

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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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.
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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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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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The work of memory collapses time.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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