Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 5

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• The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

  Theodor Adorno

  Empathy, Imitating Others, Imitation

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.154, Verso

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• The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mirrors, Law, Individual

  Theodor W. Adorno (1978). “Minima Moralia”, p.148, Verso

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• The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

  Theodor Adorno

  Sad, Suicide, Intention

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.141, Verso

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• The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

  Theodor Adorno

  Principles, Firsts, Ethics

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.50, Verso

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• Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

  Theodor Adorno

  Writing, Self, Long

  "Cultural Criticism and Society". Essay by Theodor Adorno (1949), reprinted in his book "Prisms", 1967.

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• Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

  Theodor Adorno

  Categories, Modernity, Qualitative

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.218, Verso

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• Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

  Theodor Adorno

  Simple, Vacuums, Purity

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.101, Verso

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Quality, Depth, Alternatives

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.142, Verso

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• 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 Adorno

  Life, Hate, Peculiar

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.78, Verso

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• Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Social, Art Is

  Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.9, A&C Black

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• The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

  Theodor Adorno

  Time, Men, Yesterday

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.175, Verso

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• The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.

  Theodor Adorno

  Fear, Discovery, Self

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.200, Verso

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Character, Self, Childhood

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.26, Stanford University Press

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• The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Good Man, Doe

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.185, Verso

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• Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Break Through, Coercion

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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• 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 Adorno

  Powerful, Names, Pockets

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.128, Verso

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• What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

  Theodor Adorno

  Nature, Use, Humans

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.2, Stanford University Press

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• Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Domination, Folks

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.204, Verso

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• In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

  Theodor Adorno

  Joy, Kitsch, Shameless

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• The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

  Theodor Adorno

  Sublime, Steps, Ridiculous

  Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.269, A&C Black

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• The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Kitsch, Imitation

  Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno ; Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert ; New Translations by Susan H. Gillespie”, p.364, Univ of California Press

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• 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 Adorno

  Life, Substance, Spheres

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.15, Verso

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• He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

  Theodor Adorno

  Betrayal, Past, Doe

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.166, Verso

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• The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

  Theodor Adorno

  Past, Catastrophe, Ifs

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.49, Verso

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• Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

  Theodor Adorno

  Discovery, Self, Individual

  Theodor W. Adorno (2015). “Introduction to Sociology”, p.103, John Wiley & Sons

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