A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

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

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.

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 essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.

Nothing exists except through language.

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.