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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
Art
Enjoyment
Form
Distinction
Uncritically
Enjoyed
Sharper
Criticism
Criticized
Truly
Aversion
Public
Decrease
Greater
Conventional
Social
Significance
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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