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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

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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
Still
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Ritual
Secularized
Even
Beauty
Originals
Ritualistic
Work
Values
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Profane
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Remote
Art
Forms
Cult
Form
Unique
Authentic
Stills
However
Location

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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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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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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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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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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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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
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