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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

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
Translation
Translations
Muse
Philosophy

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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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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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Walter Benjamin
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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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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin