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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.

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
Times
Exact
Forfeits
Anything
Inner
Intimation
May
Fortune
Tellers
Thousand
Unwittingly
Events
Dexterity
Coming
Forfeit
Asks
Submissive
Future
Inertia

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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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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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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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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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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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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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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