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 redeem them
Walter BenjaminThe 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 BenjaminThose who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
Walter BenjaminArt teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter BenjaminIf mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-โdestroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
Walter Benjamin