The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.” — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are referred exclusively to man.… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
“to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
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… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
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… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors. — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to… — Walter Benjamin Copy Share Image
