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

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The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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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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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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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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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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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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What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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