People know what they want because they know what other people want.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

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

All the world's not a stage. – use for Witt Jr on theatre

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.

Thinking no longer means any more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

Adorno, from various sources