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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.