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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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
Read
Cannot
Take
Men
Illiterate
Alphabet
Photograph
Future
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
Walter Benjamin
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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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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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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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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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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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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As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
Walter Benjamin