The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

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

Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness.

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

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

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.