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Walter Benjamin Quotes

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism""Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater""The role of the storyteller is to regenerate the past so that it might deliver its message for the present moment""The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule""The gold of the adventurer is not the same as the gold of the alchemist""He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest ""Every passion borders on the chaotic but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories ""Experience has taught me that the features of a man's face are a narrative which is revealed as attentively as a fragment of a written text ""The true picture of the past flits by ""To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it was ""The angel would like to stay awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them""It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present or what is present its light on what is past rather image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation""A man who died at thirty-five will appear to distant generations as a young man, almost a boy, while his contemporaries who reached a ripe old age will always seem to me to have been born old.""The work of memory collapses time""Seizing the day, amidst its acceleration and decay""History is written by the victors""The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope"