The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.