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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.

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
Boredom
Mental
Bird
Physical
Sleep
Apogee
Experience
Hatches
Dream
Relaxation
Eggs

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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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Every monument of civilization is a monument 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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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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