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The Arcades Project
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"The Arcades Project" Quotes

"The Arcades Project" is a sprawling, unfinished work that explores the cultural and social significance of 19th-century Parisian arcades.

Quotes

The flâneur must always be half-dreamer, half-awake.

Walter Benjamin

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

Walter Benjamin

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria – now a landscape, now a room.

Walter Benjamin

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.

Walter Benjamin

The only true paradises are the paradises that have been lost.

Walter Benjamin

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Walter Benjamin

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.

Walter Benjamin

The city is the matrix of the modern phantasmagoria.

Walter Benjamin

The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.

Walter Benjamin

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Walter Benjamin