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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

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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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 splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
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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.
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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.
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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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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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
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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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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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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What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
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Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor Adorno
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Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
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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 expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Theodor Adorno
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
Theodor Adorno
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
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Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
Theodor Adorno