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.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
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.
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.
Intelligence is a moral category.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
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.
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.
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.
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