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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
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
Folk
Teaches
Folks
Allow
Teach
Within
Art
Kitsch
Things
Outward
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
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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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
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Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
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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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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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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. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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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
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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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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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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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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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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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
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
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
Walter Benjamin
