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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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
Even
Glances
Things
Costumes
World
Nothingness
Exchange
Beneath
Historical
Events
Great
Mannequins
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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.
Walter Benjamin
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
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
The work of memory collapses time.
Walter Benjamin
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
Walter Benjamin
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter Benjamin
To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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.
Walter Benjamin
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
Walter Benjamin
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
Walter Benjamin
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
Walter Benjamin