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.

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

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

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

History does not belong to us; 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.

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.