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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.
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
Return
Ability
Aura
Means
Auras
Look
Idealism
Looks
Invest
Mean
Perceive
Object
Objects
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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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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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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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.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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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.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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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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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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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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