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

More quotes by 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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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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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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