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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
Counsel
Storyteller
Readers
Case
Reader
Cases
Every
Men

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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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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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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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.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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