Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.

A good physician goes to be helpful where there is most sickness. So a good philosopher should be where there is most stupidity

We contend against reason, philosophy, and nature itself; forget the great rule of doing to others as we would they should do unto us ; and after wasting our blood and treasure to no purpose, we at last sit down faint and exhausted, abandon our vain projects only because it is impossible to pursue them, and then leave it to the reasoners of a succeeding age to show how egregious has been our folly, and how blind our fury.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

Faith and reason overpower each other throughout one's life, which results in contradiction, but the conflict never ceases in any sphere.

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.

Paradox implies that stating a contradiction disposes of it.

The war existing between the senses and reason.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

Two truths cannot contradict one another.

It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run.

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

The very existence of the bicycle is an offense to reason and wisdom.

The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.