Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of the free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, ... but only for the dead God?

Wer will es schließlich selbst den allerfreiesten Geistern verübeln, wenn sie nicht mehr für eine imaginäre Nachwelt schreiben, deren Zutraulichkeit die der Zeitgenossen womöglich noch überbietet, sondern einzig für den toten Gott?

All the world's not a stage.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

Der vage Ausdruck erlaubt dem, der ihn vernimmt, das ungefähr sich vorzustellen, was ihm genehm ist und was er ohnehin meint. Der strenge erzwingt Eindeutigkeit der Auffassung, die Anstrengung des Begriffs, deren die Menschen bewußt entwöhnt werden, und mutet ihnen vor allem Inhalt Suspension der gängigen Urteile, damit ein sich Absondern zu, dem sie heftig widerstreben. Nur, was sie nicht erst zu verstehen brauchen, gilt ihnen für verständlich; nur das in Wahrheit Entfremdete, das vom Kommerz geprägte Wort berührt sie als vertraut.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Die fast unlösbare Aufgabe besteht darin, weder von der Macht der anderen, noch von der eigenen Ohnmacht sich dumm machen zu lassen.

The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.

Nun gilt für die kürzeste Verbindung zwischen zwei Personen die Gerade, so als ob sie Punkte wären.

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Zartheit zwischen Menschen ist nichts anderes als das Bewußtsein von der Möglichkeit zweckfreier Beziehungen.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.

Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

The center of intellectual self-discipline as such is in the process of decomposition. 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. What is true of the instinctual life is no less of the intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as trite this or that combination of colors or chords, the writer wincing at banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because layers of himself are drawn to them. Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one's finger-tips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it. This strength, though manifesting itself as individual resistance, is by no means of a merely individual nature. In the intellectual conscience possessed of it, the social movement is no less present than the moral super-ego. Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and its citizens. If this conception dims—and who could still trust blindly in it—the downward urge of the intellect loses its inhibitions and all the detritus dumped in the individual by barbarous culture—half-learning, slackness, heavy familiarity, coarseness—comes to light. Usually it is rationalized as humanity, desire to be understood by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline comes much too easily to him who makes it for us to believe his assurance that it is one.