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Theodor Adorno Inspirational Quotes (113)

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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
Theodor Adorno
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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor Adorno
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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno
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A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
Theodor Adorno
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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
Theodor Adorno
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
Theodor Adorno
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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Theodor Adorno
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Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
Theodor Adorno
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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Theodor Adorno
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
Theodor Adorno
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor Adorno
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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
Theodor Adorno
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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
Theodor Adorno
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The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.
Theodor Adorno
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor Adorno
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What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Theodor Adorno
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Theodor Adorno
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In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
Theodor Adorno
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Theodor Adorno
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Theodor Adorno
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All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
Theodor Adorno
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