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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.

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
Fact
Collector
Facts
Preserving
Book
Collectors
Collect
Preserve
Preserves
Books
Belief

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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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.
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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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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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