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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
Full
Use
Sprung
Past
Compulsion
Need
Abortion
Needs
Advantage
View
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Present

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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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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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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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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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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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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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 work of memory collapses time.
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