Quote

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
Objects
Return
Ability
Aura
Means
Auras
Look
Idealism
Looks
Invest
Mean
Perceive
Object

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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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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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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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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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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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We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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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.
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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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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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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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