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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.
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
Even
Glances
Things
Costumes
World
Nothingness
Exchange
Beneath
Historical
Events
Great
Mannequins
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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.
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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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 could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural 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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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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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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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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