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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

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
Every
Time
Strait
Messiah
Gate
Gates
Enter
Second
Might

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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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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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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.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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