Quotes About Philosophy

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.

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

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.

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

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

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

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

There is no true life within a false life.

The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.

Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.

But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.

Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification.

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.