Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes
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In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.
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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.
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Nothing exists except through language.
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The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
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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.
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The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.
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I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.
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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.
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The language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks to the self-understanding of every person, and it does this as ever present and by means of its own contemporaneousness. Indeed, precisely the contemporaneousness of the work allows it to come to expression in language. Everything depends on how something is said.
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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.
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Being that can be understood is language.
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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.
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Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.