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

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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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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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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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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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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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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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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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