Hans-Georg Gadamer: Something

“It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer book Truth and Method

Source: Truth and Method

Way , Nature , Sense , Universe

“The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Source: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 101 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA101 (quotation is from Goethe)
Context: The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed. The element of surprise is based on this. "So true, so filled with being" [So wahr, so seiend] is not something one knows any other way. Everything familiar is eclipsed. To understand what the work of art says to us is therefore a self-encounter.

Art , Way

“Everything depends on how something is said.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Source: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 102 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA102
Context: The language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks to the self-understanding of every person, and it does this as ever present and by means of its own contemporaneousness. Indeed, precisely the contemporaneousness of the work allows it to come to expression in language. Everything depends on how something is said.

Dependency

“We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Source: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 101 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA101
Context: We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning.

Understanding

“The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognizes that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming a utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer book Truth and Method

Foreword to the Second Edition, p. xxiv
Truth and Method (1960)

Truth , Age , Science