Quotes by Hans-Georg Gadamer

About Hans-Georg Gadamer:

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode) on hermeneutics.
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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.

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 worl...

Hans-Georg Gadamer

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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 ...

Hans-Georg Gadamer

In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they ...

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

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

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

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

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Nothing exists except through language.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Author Bio

  • NameHans-Georg Gadamer
  • DescriptionGerman philosopher
  • BornFebruary 11, 1900
  • DiedMarch 14, 2002
  • CountryGermany
  • ProfessionPhilosopher
  • WorksTruth And Method
  • AwardsOrder Of Merit For Arts And Science; Order Of Merit Of Baden-Württemberg; Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize