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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
Abortion
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Advantage
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Present
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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