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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

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
Contains
Communist
Communism
Contemporary
Meaning
Platitudes
Taught
Profundity
Experience
Bourgeois
Hierarchy

More quotes by Walter Benjamin

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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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.
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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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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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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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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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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.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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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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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 concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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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