Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
There’s not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled – even if it insists on being fooled.
In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.
The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity.
It is Proust’s courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
The taboos that constitute a man’s intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.
It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.