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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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
Emotional
Instantaneous
Effort
Kitsch
Without
Requirement
Gratification
Requirements
Distance
Offers
Intellectual
Sublimation
More quotes by 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.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
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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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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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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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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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Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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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 book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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