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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

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
Dissolve
Invent
Genre
Works
Either
Literature
Great

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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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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 good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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