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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
Art
Slogans
Ideas
Coins
Without
Inadequate
Critic
Betray
Peddle
Critics
Nutshell

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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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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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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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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 crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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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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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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