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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
Means
Auras
Look
Idealism
Looks
Invest
Mean
Perceive
Object
Objects
Return
Ability
Aura
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin
A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
Walter Benjamin
A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
Walter Benjamin
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
Walter Benjamin
The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
Walter Benjamin
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter Benjamin
Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.
Walter Benjamin
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.
Walter Benjamin
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
Walter Benjamin
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
Walter Benjamin
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
Walter Benjamin
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
Walter Benjamin
