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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
Exchange
Beneath
Historical
Events
Great
Mannequins
Even
Glances
Things
Costumes
World
Nothingness
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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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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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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