Quote

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.

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
Matter
Practicals
Pronounced
Men
Practical
Sucked
Life
Sexual
Dates
Like
Matters
Spell
Intellectual
Sphere
Politics
Spells
Conversing
Future
Spheres
Fixated
May
Possessed
Antipathy

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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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 killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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