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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

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

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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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.
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All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
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The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Theodor Adorno
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The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
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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.
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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
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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.
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Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
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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.
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
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All the world's not a stage.
Theodor Adorno
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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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.
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Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
Theodor Adorno