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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.

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
Judgment
Opinion
Public
Interest
Matter
Judgments
Opinions
Private
Judging

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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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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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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.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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