Adorno Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Adorno
Adorno Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Adorno quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos',
— Tom Service
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
— Theodor Adorno
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
— Theodor Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
— Theodor Adorno
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
— Theodor Adorno
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
— Theodor Adorno
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
— Theodor Adorno
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
— Theodor W. Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
— Theodor Adorno
In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
— Theodor Adorno
But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
— Theodor W. Adorno
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
— Theodor Adorno
There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
— Theodor Adorno
There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.
— Theodor Adorno
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
— Theodor Adorno
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
— Theodor Adorno
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
— Theodor Adorno
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
— Theodor W. Adorno
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
— Theodor Adorno
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
— Theodor Adorno
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
— Theodor Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
— Theodor Adorno
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
— Theodor Adorno
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
— Theodor Adorno
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
— Theodor Adorno
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
— Theodor Adorno
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
— Theodor W. Adorno
A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
— Theodor Adorno
There is no right life in the wrong one.
— Theodor W. Adorno
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
— Theodor Adorno
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
— Theodor Adorno
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
— Theodor Adorno
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
— Theodor Adorno
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
— Theodor Adorno
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
— Theodor 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
If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime
— Theodor W. Adorno
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
— Theodor W. Adorno
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
— Theodor Adorno
There is no true life within a false life.
— Theodor W. Adorno
The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
— Theodor Adorno
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity
— Theodor W. Adorno
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
— Theodor Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
— Theodor Adorno
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
— Theodor Adorno
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
— Theodor 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
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
— Theodor Adorno
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
— Theodor W. Adorno
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
— Theodor Adorno
Normality is death.
— Theodor Adorno
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
— Theodor Adorno
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
— Theodor Adorno
People know what they want because they know what other people want.
— Theodor W. Adorno
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
— Theodor 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
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
— Theodor Adorno
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
— Theodor Adorno
One should never begrudge deletions.
— Theodor W. Adorno
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
— Theodor Adorno
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
— Theodor Adorno
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
— Theodor Adorno
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
— Theodor Adorno
The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy
— Theodor Adorno
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
— Theodor Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
— Theodor Adorno
Nowadays most people kick with the pricks.
— Theodor W. Adorno
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
— Theodor W. Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
— Theodor Adorno
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
— Theodor Adorno
If we must die, then let us die fighting a battle worthy of remembrance in the tales of our descendants!
— Daniel Adorno
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
— Theodor Adorno
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
— Theodor Adorno
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
— Theodor Adorno
It is up to the school more than anything else to work against barbarism. ... By barbarism, I do not mean the Beatles.
— T. W. Adorno
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
— Theodor Adorno
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
— 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
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
— Theodor Adorno
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.
— Theodor Adorno
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
— Theodor W. Adorno
To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home
— Theodor W. Adorno
All the world's not a stage.
— Theodor Adorno