Best 12 quotes of Wilhelm Dilthey on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.