Quote

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

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
Critic
Betray
Peddle
Critics
Nutshell
Criticism
Betraying
Fashion
Coin
Art
Slogans
Ideas
Coins
Without
Inadequate

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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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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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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 experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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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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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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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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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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