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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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
Thinking
Scope
Masses
Unlimited
Perception
Mass
Process
Reality
Much
Adjustment
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
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In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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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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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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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.
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