Best 184 quotes of Theodor Adorno on MyQuotes

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

All the world's not a stage.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

He who integrates is lost.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.