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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.

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
Storyteller
Readers
Case
Reader
Cases
Every
Men
Counsel

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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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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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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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.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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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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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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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin