Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.

Theodor W. Adorno
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

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 W. Adorno
If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.

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