Hans-Georg Gadamer famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Being that can be understood is language.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Language #Understood
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 someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Understanding #Trying #Doe
Nothing exists except through language.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Language
The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Essence #Opening Up #Possibility
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 deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Religious #Art #Giving
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 and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Reality #Men #Thinking
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Prejudice #Speak #Tradition
I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Book #Years
The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Mirrors #Objectivity #Focus
History does not belong to us; we belong to it.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#History #Doe
The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognized that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Philosophy #Real #Men
It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Historical #Consciousness #Form
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 we live.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Self #Long #Examination
Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that one is claimed by what is being said.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Music #Silence #Listening
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 a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Art #Fun #Distance
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

#Art #Play #Understanding
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Communication #Essence #Understanding
The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Real #Taken #Language
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 consists in what is said in it.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Real #Self #Language
From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right.
-- Hans-Georg Gadamer

#Given #Thinker

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