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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.

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
Dream
Like
World
Loosens
Tooth
Individuality
Teeth
Structure

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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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