Walter Benjamin Quotes
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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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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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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The true sign of decadence is not the collusion of the university and the state (something that is by no means incompatible with honest barbarity), but the theory and guarantee of academic freedom, when in reality people assume with brutal simplicity that the aim of study is to steer its disciples to a socially conceived individuality.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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.
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Man geht immer die gleichen Wege des Denkens wie vorher. Nur scheinen sie mit Rosen bestreut.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the 'dreams of his youth.' ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.
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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.