Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes
The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.
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.
For both art and the historical sciences are ways of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence is immediately brought into play.
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
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.
The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
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.
From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right.