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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
Fields
Concerned
Knowledge
Flashes
Comes
Afterward
Long
Thunder
Text
Flash
Rolling

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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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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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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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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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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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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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