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Walter Benjamin

Read through the most famous quotes from Walter Benjamin




The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.


— Walter Benjamin


#deception #film #art

Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tensions between the poles of disorder and order.


— Walter Benjamin


#order #tension #life

Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.


— Walter Benjamin


#protocols #walter-benjamin #beauty

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.


— Walter Benjamin


#gifts #must #point #receiver #shock

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.


— Walter Benjamin


#hope #only #sake #those #us

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.


— Walter Benjamin


#destruction #ecstasy #frenzy #living #only

Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.


— Walter Benjamin


#judgments #matter #only #opinions #private

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.


— Walter Benjamin


#conviction #his #leap #like #out

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


#masses #much #perception #process #reality

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


#betraying #coin #critic #criticism #fashion






About Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Quotes




Did you know about Walter Benjamin?

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama 1928). A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964) whom he later married.

His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation alienation). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism and is associated with the Frankfurt School.

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