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.

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

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