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

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 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.

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

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

All cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind.

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.