Quote

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.

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
Past
Recognize
Doe
Memory
Mean
Danger
Really
Hold
Flashes
Way
Memories
Articulate
Moment
Seize
Means
Historically
Moments
Flash

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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.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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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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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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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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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.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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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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