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
Discovery
Capacity
Happiness
Fear
Amounting
Experience
Unrestricted
Self
Vanquished
Abandonment
Openness

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

Image
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
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
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
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
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
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
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
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
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 noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
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
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
Image
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Theodor Adorno