Quote

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

Theodor Adorno

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Theodor Adorno
Becomes
Human
Humans
Indissolubly
Imitating
Imitation
Linked
Empathy
Beings

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

Image
The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
Theodor Adorno
Image
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 Adorno
Image
Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Theodor Adorno
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
Theodor Adorno
Image
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
Image
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor Adorno
Image
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
Theodor Adorno
Image
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 Adorno