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

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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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