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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
Offers
Intellectual
Sublimation
Emotional
Instantaneous
Effort
Kitsch
Without
Requirement
Gratification
Requirements
Distance
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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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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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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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.
Walter Benjamin
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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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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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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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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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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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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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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.
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
Walter Benjamin