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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.

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
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Sprung
Past
Compulsion
Need
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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