Great Throughts Treasury

"There is no love that is not an echo."

"There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living."

"There is no right life in the wrong one."

"They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian."

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

"Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation."

"Thinking no longer means any more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think."

"To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it."

"To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet."

"Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge."

"To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults."

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

"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. -"

"Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been crudely determined by whether or not he accepted money. At times false pride became conscious criticism."

"True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves."

"Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil."

"Truth is inseparable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come."

"Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying."

"What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline."

"We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless."

"What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness. -"

"When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality."

"Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized."

"Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

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

"Whatever the intellectual does is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependents: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child."

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."