Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

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.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.