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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
Long
Thunder
Text
Flash
Rolling
Fields
Concerned
Knowledge
Flashes
Comes
Afterward

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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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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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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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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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