Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

God forgive me if I do wrong in following with ardor the strongest instincts of my nature.

The idea of 'breaking bad' and what that means in terms of the actions and decisions people make, and why they make them - it makes people question themselves in the 'What would I do?' kind of way.

If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.

From the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, comes that depth and mystery which startles us in Hamlet.

To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence, it would be to doubt everything; and then what is life for?

I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.

In my own life, I'm pretty good at choosing between good and bad. It's the choices between good and good I find the most difficult to make.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Man is lost and is wandering in a jungle where real values have no meaning. Real values can have meaning to man only when he steps on to the spiritual path, a path where negative emotions have no use.

If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

There's no point thinking, 'Well, my life's certainly worked out, I've got all the answers.' It would be wrong for me to say that I don't get seduced by certain things. That things don't become tempting.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

When we talk about self-confrontations, we are speaking about moral issues rather than social issues.

Good and bad - this is the story of my life.

Monsters will always exist. There's one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.

I lead a normal life and I don't assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don't want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I've lived.

Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts.

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

As humans, we don't know what we should do. We don't have those instincts like God has given animals. We have to see to know where we are going. It is just a natural human emotion to look for people to emulate.

With a lot of things in life, it's hard to do the right thing.