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
Ideas
Writing
Copying
Never
Fill
Already
Inspiration
Stop
Written
Running

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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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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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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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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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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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 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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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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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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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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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Walter Benjamin
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin