Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that o….

The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognized that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has som….

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here an….

History does not belong to us; we belong to it..

The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities..

Nothing exists except through language..

Being that can be understood is language..

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and….

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror..

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said..

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic ….

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication..

All cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind..

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis ….

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being con….

For both art and the historical sciences are ways of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence is immediately brought into play..

It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consci….

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of a….

From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right..

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old..

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to i….