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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
Seeds
Fruit
Understood
Tasteless
Time
Nourishing
Historically
Contains
Seed
Precious

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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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