Theodor W. Adorno - Minima Moralia (1951)

63 Sourced Quotes

View all Theodor W. Adorno Quotes
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Theodor W. Adorno
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

Theodor W. Adorno
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

Theodor W. Adorno
The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

Theodor W. Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Theodor W. Adorno
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

Theodor W. Adorno
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

Theodor W. 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 W. Adorno
The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

Theodor W. Adorno
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

Theodor W. Adorno
The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

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
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Theodor W. Adorno
What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

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
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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

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

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
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

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