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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

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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
History
Determined
Sense
Perception
Mode
Nature
Entire
Medium
Wells
Changes
Mediums
Human
Periods
Manner
Humans
Circumstances
Accomplished
Well
Humanity
Organized
Long
Existence
Historical

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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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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.
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