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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
Rolling
Fields
Concerned
Knowledge
Flashes
Comes
Afterward
Long
Thunder
Text
Flash

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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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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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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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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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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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.
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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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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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