Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

Theodor W. 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 W. Adorno
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

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

Theodor 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 W. Adorno
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

Theodor W. Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Theodor W. Adorno
In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Theodor W. Adorno
The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today.... Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.

Theodor W. Adorno
The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Theodor W. Adorno
The jargon makes it seem that … the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

Theodor W. Adorno
In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Theodor W. Adorno
Philosophy … must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

Theodor W. Adorno
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

Theodor W. Adorno
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Theodor W. Adorno
It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is the right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly.

Theodor W. Adorno
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Bourgeois sport [wants] to differentiate itself strictly from play. Its bestial seriousness consists in the fact that instead of reamaining faithful to the dream of freedom by getting away from purposiveness, the treatment of play as a duty puts it among useful purposes and thereby wipes out the trace of freedom in it. This is particularly valid for contemporary mass music. It is only play as a repetition of prescribed models, and the playful release from responsibility which is thereby achieved does not reduce at all the time devoted to duty except by transferring the responsibility to the models, the following of which one makes into a duty for himself.

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

Theodor W. Adorno