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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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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
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The whole is the false.
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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.
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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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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.
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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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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Theodor Adorno
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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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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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Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno