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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
Books
Belief
Fact
Collector
Facts
Preserving
Book
Collectors
Collect
Preserve
Preserves

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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The work of memory collapses time.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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!
Walter Benjamin