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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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
Stills
Still
Long
Beggar
Myth
Around
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Walter Benjamin
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.
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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.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
Walter Benjamin
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Walter Benjamin
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
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
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
Walter Benjamin
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Walter Benjamin
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
Walter Benjamin
[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!
Walter Benjamin
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
Walter Benjamin
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
Walter Benjamin
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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
