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.

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

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

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.

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

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

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