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Absence
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Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
-Walter Benjamin
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Advice
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
-Walter Benjamin
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Apathy
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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Argument & Debate
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
-Walter Benjamin
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Art
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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Authors & Writing
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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Beauty
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
-Walter Benjamin
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Birth
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
-Walter Benjamin
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Books
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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.
-Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library, 1931
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Boredom
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
-Walter Benjamin
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Charity
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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
-Walter Benjamin
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
-Walter Benjamin
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City Life, Cities
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Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
-Walter Benjamin
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Communism
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
-Walter Benjamin
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Criticism
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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.
-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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Destruction, Destructive
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
-Walter Benjamin
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Experience
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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.
-Walter Benjamin
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Facts
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
-Walter Benjamin
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Food
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
-Walter Benjamin
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Identity
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. 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. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand --like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery --in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
-Walter Benjamin
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Legacy
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form -- it may be called fleeting or eternal -- is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
-Walter Benjamin
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Life
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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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Manners
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
-Walter Benjamin
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Masses
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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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Books by and about Walter Benjamin