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

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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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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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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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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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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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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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