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

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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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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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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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