Quote

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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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Social
Significance
Art
Enjoyment
Form
Distinction
Uncritically
Enjoyed
Sharper
Criticism
Criticized
Truly
Aversion
Public
Decrease
Greater
Conventional

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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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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 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.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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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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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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