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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
Belief
Fact
Collector
Facts
Preserving
Book
Collectors
Collect
Preserve
Preserves
Books
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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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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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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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Walter Benjamin
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Walter Benjamin
