Minima Moralia Quotes

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Life has become the ideology of its own absence.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“There is no true life within a false life.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.”
― Theodor W. Adorno , Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life

“In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Die fast unlösbare Aufgabe besteht darin, weder von der Macht der anderen, noch von der eigenen Ohnmacht sich dumm machen zu lassen.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be ‘after’ something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counterclaims.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on 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, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Even solidarity, the most honourable mode of
conduct of socialism, is sick. Solidarity was once intended to make the talk of brotherhood real, by lifting it out of generality, where it was an ideology, and reserving it for the particular, the Patty, as the sole representative in an antagonistic world of generality. It was manifested by groups of people who together put their lives at stake, counting their own concerns as less important in face of a tangible possibility, so that, without being possessed by an abstract idea, but also without individual hope, they were ready to sacrifice themselves for each other.”
― Adorno Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“The practical orders of life, while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human qualities, and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender. For tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Psychology knows that he who imagines disasters in some way desires them. But why do they come so eagerly to meet him.l Something in reality strikes a chord in paranoid fantasy and is warped by it. The sadism latent in everyone unerringly divines the weakness latent in everyone. And the fantasy of persecution is contagious: wherever it occurs spectators are driven irresistibly to imitate it.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Nema više ničeg lijepog i utješnog, osim u očima koje gledaju užas pravo u lice, odolijevaju mu i s nepomućenim osjećajem za negativnost brane mogućnost postojanja nečeg boljeg.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life