Quote

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

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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
Good
Finally
Musical
Textile
Piece
Textiles
Pieces
Architectural
Levels
Proceeds
Three
Constructed
Writing
Composed
Work
Woven

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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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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.
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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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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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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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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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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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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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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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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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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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