Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno Quotes
157 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive.... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Hegel... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. … However,... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
The jargon of authenticity … is a trademark of societalized chosenness, … sub-language as superior language.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind— Geist —was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor W. Adorno
Source
Report...
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor W. Adorno
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Theodor W. Adorno
Creative Commons
Born:
September 11, 1903
Died:
August 6, 1969
(aged 65)
Bio:
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.
Known for:
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Minima Moralia (1951)
Aesthetic Theory
Negative Dialectics (1966)
The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)
Most used words:
philosophy
time
freedom
people
culture
human
society
concept
self
thought
language
true
individual
precisely
art
Theodor W. Adorno on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Theodor W. Adorno Quotes
Theodor W. Adorno Short Quotes
German Philosopher Quotes
Philosopher Quotes
20th-century Philosopher Quotes
Related People
Max Horkheimer
German Philosopher
Herbert Marcuse
German Philosopher
Jürgen Habermas
German Philosopher
Walter Benjamin
German Social critic
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes