36 Quotes by Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

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.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

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.

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.

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

There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

The primordial experiences that are transmitted through art and history are not to be grasped from the points of view of these forms of consciousness.

From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right.