Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Afterlife, in my mind, is pretty much nothing. This is it. This is what we get, for me.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? ---"On death

My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife.

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?

Hatred is so lasting and stubborn, that reconciliation on a sickbed certainly forebodes death.

I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset cos' they act like people", said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.

There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.

Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.

Life... It's a great and terrible and short and endless thing. None of us come out of it alive.

Don't die until you're dead.

I have heard a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They have n't got life enough in them.... Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.

Life is nothing unless death has been faced down.

You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation.

Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity- and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

The only certainty is death.

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.