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

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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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 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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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.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given 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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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