25 Quotes by Wilhelm Dilthey

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature.

However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.

Thus there arose in me both a need and a plan for the foundation of the human sciences.

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.

Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.