Quotes from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life

“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

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“Lest soviel ihr könnt! Lest Straßenschilder und Speisekarten, lest die Anschläge im Bürgermeisteramt, lest von mir aus Schundliteratur - aber lest! Lest! Sonst seid ihr verloren!”
― Walter Moers, quote from Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures

“As Pa speaks, I know he thinks someone in our family has stolen the rice. The story of the rat is not true and everyone knows it. Convinced that he realises it was me, I hide my eyes from him. Shame burns my hand like a hot iron branding me for all to see; Pa's favourite child stole from the family. As if to rescue me,Geak wakes up and her screams of hunger interrupt the incident.”
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“She sat silently in her rocking chair. Some people are good at talking, but Granny Weatherwax was good at silence. She could sit so quiet and still that
she faded. You forgot she was there. The room became empty.
Tiffany thought of it as the I’m-not-here spell, if it was a spell. She reasoned that everyone had something inside them that told the world they
were there. That was why you could often sense when someone was behind you, even if they were making no sound at all. You were receiving their
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Some people had a very strong one. They were the people who got served first in shops. Granny Weatherwax had an I-am-here signal that bounced off the mountains when she wanted it to; when she walked into a forest, all the wolves and bears ran out the other side. She could turn it off, too. She was doing that now. Tiffany was having to concentrate to see her. Most of her mind was telling her that there was no one there at all.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Wintersmith

“From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in the world of souls transparent to one other; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were--but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of sudden silence, the teacher, in a chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Invitation to a Beheading

“If you find him sad, say I am dancing. If in mirth, report that I am sudden sick.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Antony and Cleopatra

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