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
Truly
Aversion
Public
Decrease
Greater
Conventional
Social
Significance
Art
Enjoyment
Form
Distinction
Uncritically
Enjoyed
Sharper
Criticism
Criticized

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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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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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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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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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