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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.
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
Every
Irretrievably
Recognised
Threatens
Disappear
Image
Present
Past
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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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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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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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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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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