261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.

As the arrangements of life no longer allow time for pleasure conscious of itself, replacing it by the performance of physiological functions, de-inhibited sex is itself de-sexualized. Really, they no longer want ecstasy at all, but merely compensation for an outlay that, best of all, they would like to save as superfluous.

If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

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.

The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

В тот момент, когда в каком-нибудь аккорде уже не слышна его историческая выразительность, он настоятельно требует, чтобы в его исторических импликациях учитывалось то, что его окружает.