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

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 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 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.

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

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

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