Quotes by Wilhelm Dilthey

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At the foundation of poetic creation is personal experience, the understanding of foreign realities, the broadening and deepening of experience through ideas. The starting point of poetic creation is always life experience, as a personal experience or as an understanding of other people, contemporaries or of the past, as well as of the events in which they acted together.

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Art...makes us understand each other better, in what we have more personally, to broaden our horizons beyond our own soul life. The geniuses of soul life reveal to each of us his own inner life. And they allow us to glimpse inside a foreign world, to which we are nevertheless related. In the fullness of these poetic individualities, we sense the richness of human interiority.

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Poetry is the representation and expression of life.

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For the poet, humanity is present in that he experiences human existence through himself and tries to understand it as it appears to him from the outside. The visionary gaze of the true poet rises, through comprehension, towards infinity. For in understanding he transmits to the foreign existence all his inner experience.