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

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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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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
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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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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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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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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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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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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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Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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