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The distracted person, too, can form habits.

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
Distracted
Habits
Habit
Form
Persons
Person

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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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