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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
Future
Read
Cannot
Take
Men
Illiterate
Alphabet
Photograph
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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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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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Walter Benjamin
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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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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It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
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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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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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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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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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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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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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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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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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