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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
Moments
Flash
Past
Recognize
Doe
Memory
Mean
Danger
Really
Hold
Flashes
Way
Memories
Articulate
Moment
Seize
Means
Historically
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
Walter Benjamin
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
Walter Benjamin
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Walter Benjamin
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
Walter Benjamin
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Walter Benjamin
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
Walter Benjamin
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Walter Benjamin
Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
Walter Benjamin
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
Walter Benjamin
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
Walter Benjamin
Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Walter Benjamin
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Walter Benjamin
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
Walter Benjamin
