Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

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

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.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

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.

The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.