Theodor Adorno Quotes on Psychology

38 quotes

6. 'A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.'

12. 'And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.'

20. 'Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.'

28. 'For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.'

31. 'Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.'

32. 'He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.'

33. 'He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.'

34. 'He who integrates is lost.'

35. 'He who matures early lives in anticipation.'

36. 'He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.'

39. 'Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.'

42. 'In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.'

44. 'In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.'

48. 'In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them.'

52. 'Intelligence is a moral category.'

54. 'Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.'

57. 'Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.'

58. 'Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.'

63. 'No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.'

65. 'Normality is death.'

66. 'Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.'

67. 'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.'

72. 'Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.'

76. 'Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs.'

77. 'Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian rule. Its organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their consciousness to its own.'

78. 'Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.'

82. 'The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.'

84. 'The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.'

86. 'The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.'

100. '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.'

101. 'The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.'

103. 'The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.'

105. '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.'

117. 'There is no love that is not an echo.'

119. 'They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs.'

124. '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.'

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

135. 'Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.'

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