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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

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
Order
Precariousness
Balancing
Extreme
Extremes
Balance

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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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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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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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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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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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