261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

Der Versuch, dem objektiven Gehalt Bachs zu seinem Recht zu verhelfen, indem man die subjektive Anstrengung bloß daran wendet, das Subjekt auszumerzen, überschlägt sich. Objektivität bleibt nicht als Rest der Substraktion des Subjekts zurück.

There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

Folly is truth in the form which men are struck with as amid untruth they will not let truth go.

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

Музыка - враг судьбы... Лишь начиная с Вагнера, музыка стала подражать судьбе

Relativism is an illusion that arises as soon as something is handled according to foreign, transcendental criteria.

You can see likewise that the contradiction involved in the concept of 'salvaging' is not asimple intellectual contradiction, but a dialectical one. That is to say, it is only possible to rescue ontology in the shape of this dialecticalcontradiction, in this pattern in which existence and existent things are mutually interrelated and interdependent - as opposed to an abstract conception of ontology as pure existence standing in absolute opposition to existing beings.

You can see likewise that the contradiction involved in the concept of 'salvaging' is not asimple intellectual contradiction, but a dialectical one. That is to say, it is only possible to rescue ontology in the shape of this dialectical contradiction, in this pattern in which existence and existent things are mutually interrelated and interdependent - as opposed to an abstract conception of ontology as pure existence standing in absolute opposition to existing beings.