Theodor W. Adorno · 256 pages
Rating: (2.6K votes)
“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty,
nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such
awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“There is no true life within a false life.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“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, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“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, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“Der Verfall des Schenkens spiegelt sich in der peinlichen Erfindung der Geschenkartikel, die bereits darauf angelegt sind, daß man nicht weiß, was man schenken soll, weil man es eigentlich gar nicht will. Diese Waren sind beziehungslos wie ihre Käufer.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“even there, where the rejection of the system is taken for granted and for that reason a lax and cunning conformism of its own has developed.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“A l d i l à d e i m o n t i . Biancaneve esprime la malinconia in modo più perfetto di ogni altra fiaba. L'immagine più pura di questo sentimento è quella della regina che guarda la neve che cade attraverso i vetri della finestra e si augura di avere una bambina che somigli alla bellezza senza vita e pur vivente dei fiocchi, alla tinta nera e luttuosa del telaio della finestra e alla goccia di sangue che scaturisce dalla puntura, e che muore proprio nel momento in cui essa nasce. Questa impressione iniziale non può essere cancellata nemmeno dal lieto fine della favola. Come l'esaudimento della preghiera non era altro che la morte, così anche il salvataggio finale rimane una semplice apparenza. Poiché la percezione più profonda del lettore o dell'ascoltatore non riesce a credere che sia stata svegliata effettivamente la fanciulla che giaceva come se dormisse nella sua bara di vetro. E il boccone di mela avvelenato che le esce dalla gola per effetto delle scosse subite durante il viaggio non è forse, piuttosto che lo strumento adoperato per ucciderla, l'ultimo resto della vita sciupata e messa al bando, da cui essa guarisce veramente soltanto ora, che non è più esposta alle tentazioni di nessuna falsa messaggera? E come suona fragile e caduca la felicità espressa nelle parole: «Allora Biancaneve gli volle bene e andò insieme a lui». Come è smentita, subito dopo, dalla perfidia del trionfo che è celebrato sulla malvagità. Così una voce ci dice, quando speriamo nella salvezza, che la nostra speranza è vana, eppure è soltanto lei, la speranza impotente, a permetterci anche solo di tirare il fiato. Ogni contemplazione e speculazione filosofica non può fare altro che ricalcare pazientemente, in figure e abbozzi sempre nuovi, l'ambiguità della malinconia. La verità è inseparabile dall'illusione che un giorno, dalle figure e dai simboli dell'apparenza, possa emergere, nonostante tutto, libera da ogni traccia di apparenza, l'immagine reale della salvezza.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
“in the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which stands naked violence.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
Theodor W. Adorno
Born place: in Frankfurt, Germany
Born date September 11, 1903
See more on GoodReads
“Ich weiß nicht, ob die verdummte Unterhaltung nach und nach dem kollektiven Intellekt unserer Nation geschadet hat oder ob die geistige Faulheit des Publikums zuerst da war und wir sie nur bedient haben.”
― quote from Torture the Artist. Joey Goebel
“Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.”
― David Eagleman, quote from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
“Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“overgrown fields, obviously abandoned. We must be getting close to the next village, which was just as well. The sun was approaching the horizon, and the constant battle with the wind was exhausting for us as well as the horses. Fierce”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, quote from The Girl of Ink and Stars
The Fire Chronicle
Season of Migration...
Ark Angel
Full Tilt
The Songlines
So Much CloserBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
