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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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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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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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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