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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
Extinction
Flight
Begin
Minerva
Dark
Hegel
Doe
Collector
Owl
Collectors
Comprehend

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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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