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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
Works
Either
Literature
Great
Dissolve
Invent
Genre

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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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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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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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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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