"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 language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted."

~ Hans-Georg Gadamer #Botd 1900

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

"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

"All cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind."
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

"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."
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

"The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities."
~ 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 to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it."
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

"Nothing exists except through language."
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

"It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition."
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

"The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror."
~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

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