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Walter Benjamin Quotes
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
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The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
Walter Benjamin
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
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Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
Walter Benjamin
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Where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth—that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
Walter Benjamin
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We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This did not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
Walter Benjamin
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In the fields with which we are concerned knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.
Walter Benjamin
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
Walter Benjamin
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter Benjamin
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
Walter Benjamin
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Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.
Walter Benjamin
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Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
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Treatises may be didactic in tone, but essentially they lack the conclusiveness of an instruction which could be asserted, like doctrine, by virtue of its own authority.... Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.
Walter Benjamin
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
Walter Benjamin
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In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
Walter Benjamin
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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.
Walter Benjamin
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Walter Benjamin
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
Walter Benjamin
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Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals.... The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.
Walter Benjamin
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
Walter Benjamin
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Walter Benjamin
Born:
July 15, 1892
Died:
September 26, 1940
(aged 48)
Bio:
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic.
Known for:
Arcades Project
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928)
Berlin childhood around 1900
One-way street, and other writings
Most used words:
time
work
art
life
experience
original
language
books
truth
ritual
moment
human
nature
public
historical
Walter Benjamin on Wikipedia
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