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.
More Quotes from Walter Benjamin:
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.Walter Benjamin
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
Walter Benjamin
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
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
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter Benjamin
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Based on Topics: Man Quotes, Wisdom & Knowledge QuotesBased on Keywords: collectors, deposit, meticulous, prosaic, scatters, severed, stratum, torsos
The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.
Joseph Addison
We are the recorders and reporters of facts - not the judges of the behaviors we describe.
Alfred Kinsey
We need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight.
Calvin Coolidge