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

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.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.