In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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.

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

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.