Guess quote

Walter Benjamin [1892-1940] German

Rank: 101
Critic, Philosopher

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism.

Wisdom, Art, Attitude, Experience, Hope, Knowledge, Truth

Quote	Tags	Rank
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.	Wisdom	101
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.	Hope	102
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.		103
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.		104
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.	Attitude	105
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.		106
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.	Art, Truth, Wisdom	107
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.	Experience	108
He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.		109
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.		110
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.		111
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.		112
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.		113
Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.		114
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.	Knowledge	115
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.		116
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.		117
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.		118
All disgust is originally disgust at touching.		119
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.		120
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.		121
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.		122
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.		123
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.		124
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.		125
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.		126
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.		201
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.		202
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.		203
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.		204

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