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. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

History does not belong to us; we belong to it.

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

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 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.

For both art and the historical sciences are ways of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence is immediately brought into play.

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