Quote

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

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
Already
Inspiration
Stop
Written
Running
Ideas
Writing
Copying
Never
Fill

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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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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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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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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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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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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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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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