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

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

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

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

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

No emancipation without that of society.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Fascism is itself less ‘ideological’, in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

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

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Normality is death.

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

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

He who integrates is lost.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

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

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

In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.

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

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

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

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

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.