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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
Events
Great
Mannequins
Even
Glances
Things
Costumes
World
Nothingness
Exchange
Beneath
Historical

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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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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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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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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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