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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

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
Historically
Contains
Seed
Precious
Seeds
Fruit
Understood
Tasteless
Time
Nourishing

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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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.
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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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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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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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.
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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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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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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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