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

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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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