Top 160 Theodor W. Adorno Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

102. “The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

103. “As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

104. “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.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

105. “In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

106. “Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

107. “Whereas the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjectless capitalism, inflicts its destruction blindly, the deludedly rebellious subject is willing to see that destruction as its fulfillment, and, together with the biting cold it emits toward human beings misused as things, it also radiates the perverted love which, in the world of things, takes the place of love in its immediacy.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

108. “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

109. “Ever since Plato, bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objective antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is torn apart by it.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

110. “The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

111. “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.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

112. “Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

113. “The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

114. “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

115. “In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

116. “The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

117. “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 W. Adorno

118. “The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

119. “He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

120. “Nowadays most people kick with the pricks.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

121. “What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

122. “The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

123. “In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

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

— Theodor W. Adorno

125. “When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

126. “Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

127. “Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

128. “Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

129. “There’s not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

130. “Among today’s adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

131. “Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

132. “The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

133. “Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

134. “The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

135. “I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

136. “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.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

137. “The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

138. “The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

139. “The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

140. “In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

141. “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 W. Adorno

142. “Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

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

— Theodor W. Adorno

144. “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 W. Adorno

145. “Nothing, for us, can fill the place of undiminished brightness except the unconscious dark; nothing that of what once we might have been, except the dream that we had never been born.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

146. “In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

147. “The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

148. “Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

149. “The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

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

— Theodor W. Adorno