Quote

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

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
Even
Elements
Work
Unique
Time
Existence
Space
Perfect
Reproduction
Art
Lacking
Place
Element
Happens
Presence

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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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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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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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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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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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.
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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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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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[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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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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