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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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
Collectors
Comprehend
Extinction
Flight
Begin
Minerva
Dark
Hegel
Doe
Collector
Owl
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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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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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 more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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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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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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