Walter Benjamin

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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
Collection: Attitude
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Wisdom
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Hope
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Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Experience
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Experience
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Wisdom
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Knowledge
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It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Hope
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Death
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
- Walter Benjamin
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
- Walter Benjamin
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
- Walter Benjamin
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
- Walter Benjamin
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
- Walter Benjamin
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
- Walter Benjamin
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
- Walter Benjamin
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The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
- Walter Benjamin
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
- Walter Benjamin
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
- Walter Benjamin
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Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
- Walter Benjamin
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
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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
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
- Walter Benjamin
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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.
- Walter Benjamin
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
- Walter Benjamin
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
- Walter Benjamin
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Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Inspirational
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Learning
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The work of memory collapses time.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Memories
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Book
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Art
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History breaks down into images, not into stories.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Stories
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Civilization
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Given
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Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Intimate Relationships
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Symphony
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The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Ideas
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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.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Past
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Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Thinking
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Writing
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You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Book
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Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Writing
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Art
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Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Fall
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
- Walter Benjamin
Collection: Death