Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.

All goals apart from the means are illusions; becoming is a denial of being.

Bewildered, bewildered, you have no complaint. You are what you are, and you ain't what you ain't.

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.

Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

All things of the world are born of being; being is born of nonbeing.

If there is existence, there must be non-existence. And if there was a time when nothing existed, there must have been a time before that - when even nothing did not exist. Suddenly, when nothing came into existence, could one really say whether it belonged to the category of existence or non-existence?

Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist.

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

On human levels of consciousness one may emphasize getting and having as the prime goals, in spiritual consciousness he seeks the way of giving and being.

Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.

No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

The wise person dines on something more subtle: He eats the understanding that the named was born from the unnamed, that all being flows from non-being, that the describable world emanates from an indescribable source.

Is it true that existence consists only in the action of energy? Or is it not rather that energy is an output of Existence?

Nothingness is the basis of everything.

How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

From What-is all the world of things was born But What-is sprang in turn from What-is-not.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is everywhere, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space that it occupies; and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And hence it follows that space is an effect arising from the first existence of being, because when any being is postulated, space is postulated.