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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
Folks
Allow
Teach
Within
Art
Kitsch
Things
Outward
Folk
Teaches
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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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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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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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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The work of memory collapses time.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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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.
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For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
Walter Benjamin
