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 Copy Share Image
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… — 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
