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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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
Present
Facts
Power
Life
Convictions
Construction
Conviction
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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
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
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
Walter Benjamin
Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Walter Benjamin
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Walter Benjamin
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
Walter Benjamin
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
Walter Benjamin
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
Walter Benjamin
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Walter Benjamin
Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
Walter Benjamin
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
Walter Benjamin
