Quote

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

Theodor Adorno

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Theodor Adorno
Documents
Reflect
Forms
History
Art
Form
Men
Truthfully

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

Image
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor Adorno
Image
All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
Theodor Adorno
Image
There is no true life within a false life.
Theodor Adorno
Image
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
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
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
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
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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
In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
Theodor Adorno
Image
The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Theodor Adorno
Image
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
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
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