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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
Literature
Great
Dissolve
Invent
Genre
Works
Either

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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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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 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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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