Quotes from Wilhelm Dilthey

Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.

The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision.

A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.

Thus there arose in me both a need and a plan for the foundation of the human sciences.

Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.

If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

What man is, only his history tells.

What is experienced from within cannot be categorized in concepts that have been developed for the external world of the senses.

In the case of lived experience, there is no difference between an object that is perceived and the eye that perceives it.

Paradox is a characteristic of truth.

We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it.

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.