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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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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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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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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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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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