Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.

Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.

Music would lose its charm were not dissonance interspersed at frequent intervals. The closer a composer can come to discord without actually entering it in the score, the more pleasing will be his composition when given life through musical instruments.

Some voices don't blend. They just kinda rub against each other.

The fairest harmony springs from discord.

Finding beauty in the dissonance.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music.

To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

So, you can set up an orchestra down this end of the railway station playing one particular area, and simultaneously at the other end something completely different going on. And in the middle they meet, or not, depending.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth ... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict.

The sad truth is that the opposite of 'war' is not 'peace'.

Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.

The whole notion of an alternative truth is a paradox. How can you have an alternative to truth?

Discord gives a relish for concord.

Life really is a series of contrasts.

Nature is harmony in discord.

So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

Discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay.

Consonance, says the dictionary, is the combination of several tones into a harmonic unit. Dissonance results from the deranging of this harmony by the addition of tones foreign to it. One must admit that all this is not clear. Ever since it appeared in our vocabulary, the word 'dissonance' has carried with it a certain odor of sinfulness. Let us light our lantern: in textbook language, dissonance is an element of transition, a complex or interval of tones that is not complete in itself and that must be resolved to the ear's satisfaction into a perfect consonance.