Quote

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

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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
Hands
Rule
Unexpected
Ingenious
Around
Fields
Hidden
Assure
Things
Close
Camera
Comprehension
Objects
Manage
Focusing
Hand
Cameras
Commonplace
Lives
Familiar
Exploring
Manages
Action
Details
Immense
Extends
Film
Field
Guidance
Necessities

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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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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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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
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All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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