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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

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
Men
Capable
Art
Film
Form
Firsts
Matter
Demonstrating
Play
Tricks
First
Plays

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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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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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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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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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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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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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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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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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