Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes

19 quotes in 308 categories

• 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…
• The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
• The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
• 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…
• Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that…
• It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.
• I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.
• Nothing exists except through language.
• For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play.
• The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.
• The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.
• Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which…
• It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented…
• We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what…
• 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,…
• A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can…
• History does not belong to us; we belong to it.
• 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…
• In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

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