“The holiness of life that shines forth precisely in what is ugliest and most distorted [–] this light does not come to us directly, but only refracted: something that must be thought beautiful solely because it exists, is for that very reason ugly. The concept of life in its abstraction, that is resorted to here, is inseparable from what is repressive and ruthless, truly deadly and destructive. The cult of life for its own sake always boiled down to the cult of these powers. […] Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself. Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypostasized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, insolence and braggadocio. To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.”

– Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 48