"The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope."
― Walter Benjamin
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"The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation."
― Walter Benjamin |
"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."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out."
― Walter Benjamin |
"To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope."
― Walter Benjamin
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"How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books."
― Walter Benjamin
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"I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation."
― Walter Benjamin
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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."
― 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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"As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Books and harlots have their quarrels in public."
― Walter Benjamin
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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."
― Walter Benjamin |
"The work of memory collapses time."
― Walter Benjamin
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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."
― Walter Benjamin
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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."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons"
― Walter Benjamin
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"Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism.."
― Walter Benjamin
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"All disgust is originally disgust at touching."
― Walter Benjamin
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"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
― Walter Benjamin |
"It is only for those without hope that hope is given."
― Walter Benjamin |
"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."
― Walter Benjamin |
"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death."
― Walter Benjamin
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"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was".It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger."
― Walter Benjamin |
"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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"To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens."
― Walter Benjamin
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"Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help."
― Walter Benjamin
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"If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them"
― Walter Benjamin
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"In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers."
― Walter Benjamin
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