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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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
Decisive
Complacency
Improvisation
Blows
Handed
Struck
Blow
Left
Lefties
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
Walter Benjamin
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
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Walter Benjamin
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Walter Benjamin
What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
Walter Benjamin
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
Walter Benjamin
The distracted person, too, can form habits.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Walter Benjamin
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
Walter Benjamin
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
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
Walter Benjamin
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter Benjamin