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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
What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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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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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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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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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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.
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