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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

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
Arrest
Involves
Flow
Thoughts
Wells
Well
Thinking

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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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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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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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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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