Theodor W. Adorno Quotes & Sayings

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning — Theodor W. Adorno

There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more. — Theodor W. Adorno

Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime — Theodor W. Adorno

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them. — Theodor W. Adorno

A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'. — Theodor W. Adorno

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality. — Theodor W. Adorno

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available. — Theodor W. Adorno

The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council. — Theodor W. Adorno

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. — Theodor W. Adorno

There is no right life in the wrong one. — Theodor W. Adorno

If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy. — Theodor W. Adorno

In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. — Theodor W. Adorno

The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition. — Theodor W. Adorno

In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object. — Theodor W. Adorno

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. — Theodor W. Adorno

People know what they want because they know what other people want. — Theodor W. Adorno

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. — Theodor W. Adorno

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists. — Theodor W. Adorno

...there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. — Theodor W. Adorno

You can see likewise that the contradiction involved in the concept of 'salvaging' is not a
simple intellectual contradiction, but a dialectical one. That is to say, it is only possible to rescue ontology in the shape of this dialectical
contradiction, in this pattern in which existence and existent things are mutually interrelated and interdependent - as opposed to an abstract conception of ontology as pure existence standing in absolute opposition to existing beings. — Theodor W. Adorno

Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche's, when he proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction, when he himself puts into practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses capitalise, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly jubilant movements unmask jubilation; his subjective incapacity for the happy end denounces itself. — Theodor W. Adorno

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. — Theodor W. Adorno

Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity. — Theodor W. Adorno

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. — Theodor W. Adorno

Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. — Theodor W. Adorno

Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military manners. Now, as earlier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. — Theodor W. Adorno

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation. — Theodor W. Adorno

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid. — Theodor W. Adorno

Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them. — Theodor W. Adorno

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil. — Theodor W. Adorno

Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. — Theodor W. Adorno

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. — Theodor W. Adorno

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison. — Theodor W. Adorno

Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality. — Theodor W. Adorno

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

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. — Theodor W. Adorno

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light. — Theodor W. Adorno

One should never begrudge deletions. — Theodor W. Adorno

The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down. — Theodor W. Adorno

There is no true life within a false life. — Theodor W. Adorno

To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home — Theodor W. Adorno

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. — Theodor W. Adorno

Among today's adept practitioners, 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. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive. — Theodor W. Adorno

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying. — Theodor W. Adorno

Dissonance is the truth about harmony. — Theodor W. Adorno

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. — Theodor W. Adorno

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects. — Theodor W. Adorno

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. — Theodor W. Adorno

There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. — Theodor W. Adorno

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth — Theodor W. Adorno

But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men. — Theodor W. Adorno

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies. — Theodor W. Adorno

The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. — Theodor W. Adorno

There is no love that is not an echo. — Theodor W. Adorno

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God? — Theodor W. Adorno

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth. — Theodor W. Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. — Theodor W. Adorno

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. — Theodor W. Adorno

Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end. — Theodor W. Adorno

Nowadays most people kick with the pricks. — Theodor W. Adorno

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. — Theodor W. Adorno

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. — Theodor W. Adorno

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. — Theodor W. Adorno

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. — Theodor W. Adorno

Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil. — Theodor W. Adorno

Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state. — Theodor W. Adorno

Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification. — Theodor W. Adorno

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. — Theodor W. Adorno

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. — Theodor W. Adorno

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity — Theodor W. Adorno

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. — Theodor W. Adorno

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. — Theodor W. Adorno