Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Theodor Adorno
Experience
Unrestricted
Self
Vanquished
Abandonment
Openness
Discovery
Capacity
Happiness
Fear
Amounting

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

Image
The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor Adorno
Image
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
Theodor Adorno
Image
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
Theodor Adorno
Image
What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
Theodor Adorno
Image
All the world's not a stage.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
Image
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
Image
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor Adorno
Image
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Theodor Adorno
Image
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Theodor Adorno
Image
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
Theodor Adorno
Image
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
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