Quote

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.

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
Picture
Demand
Caption
Value
Ravages
Ability
Confer
Values
Rescue
Upon
Beneath
Use
Revolutionary
Must
Photographer

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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.
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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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We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.
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The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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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.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
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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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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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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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