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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
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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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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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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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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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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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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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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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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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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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.
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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.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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