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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
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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
Left
Handed
Life
Struck
Rely
Unduly
Blow
Decisive
Lies
Complacency
Strength
Improvisation
Days
Blows
Lying
Competence
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Walter Benjamin
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
Walter Benjamin
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
Walter Benjamin
Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
Walter Benjamin
Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
Walter Benjamin
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
Walter Benjamin
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Walter Benjamin
He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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
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
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.
Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
Walter Benjamin
We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
Walter Benjamin
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
Walter Benjamin
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
Walter Benjamin
