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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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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.
Walter Benjamin