'The whole is the untrue'

Dwarf fruit. – It is the courtesy of Proust to spare the reader the embarrassment of thinking themselves more adroit than the author.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream, and it always turned into a vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable, and it was already a dream.

In the Anglo-Saxon lands, the whores look as if they dispensed the punishments of hell along with the sins.

Beauty of the American landscape: that the immeasurable size of the entire land is inscribed, as expression, even in the smallest of its segments.

In the memory of emigration, every German venison roast tastes as if it was freshly felled by the Freischuetz.

Nothing is true in psychoanalysis except its exaggerations.

One can tell if one is happy by listening to the wind. This latter reminds the unhappy of the fragility of their house and pursues them in fitful sleep and violent dreams. To the happy, it sings the song of their safety and security [Geborgensein]: its raging whistle registers the fact that it no longer has any power over them.

The silent din, long familiar to us from our dream-experiences, blares in our waking hours from the newspaper headlines.

The mythical message of doom renews itself in the radio. Whoever broadcasts something important in an authoritarian manner, broadcasts trouble. In English solemn [in English in original] means ceremonial and threatening. The power of the society behind the speaker turns by itself against the listener.

That which has most recently happened is always portrayed as if it had been destroyed in a catastrophe.

The expression of that which is historical in things is nothing other than past torment.

In Hegel, self-consciousness was the truth of self-certainty, according to the words of the Phenomenology [of Spirit], the “native realm of truth.” No sooner had they ceased to understand that, than the bourgeoisie were self-conscious at least in the pride that they owned property. Today self-conscious [in English in original] means only the reflection on the ego as an embarrassment, as the innervation of powerlessness: to know, that one is nothing.

With many people, it’s already an exercise in shamelessness, when they say I.

The mote in your own eye is the best magnifying glass.

Even the most impoverished person is capable of recognizing the weaknesses of the most powerful; even the dumbest, the mental errors of the most clever.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always wrong.

The whole is the untrue.

 

From: Theodor Adorno's 'Minima Moralia', Aphorisms 1-50, 1951