Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
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.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
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.
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
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.
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. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.
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 recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch
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.
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
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.
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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