Author

Walter Benjamin

13 quotations

About Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and post-Kantianism, he made contributions to the philosophy of history, metaphysics, historical materialism, criticism, and aesthetics, and had an oblique but overwhelmingly influential impact on the resurrection of the Kabbalah by virtue of his life-long epistolary relationship with Gershom S…

Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Walter Benjamin
Topics: Experience Wisdom Art Attitude Beauty Death
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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.

Advertisement

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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 …