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

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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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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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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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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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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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