Quotes by Theodor Adorno

...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver natures language into the hands of another language foreign to it.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Intelligence is a moral category.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

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

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all ones own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

“As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.”