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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

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
Comes
Afterward
Long
Thunder
Text
Flash
Rolling
Fields
Concerned
Knowledge
Flashes

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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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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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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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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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin