Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. Its ideal is rather…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

Nothing exists except through language.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“In the independent existence that work gives the thing, working consciousness finds itself again as an independent consciousness. Work is restrained desire.…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“The sense of taste is able to gain the distance necessary for choosing and judging what is the most urgent necessity of…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“The same thing is true of the experience of art. Here the scholarly research pursued by the "science of art" is aware…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it.”

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“The sensus communis plays no part in Kant—not even in the logical sense. What Kant treats in the transcendental doctrine of judgment—i.e.,…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“As in play, it rests on a common willingness of the participants in conversation to lend themselves to the emergence of something…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“Human science too is concerned with establishing similarities, regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to predict individual phenomena…

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

— Hans-Georg Gadamer