Martin Heidegger Thinking Quotations

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

...Before considering the question that is seemingly always the most immediate one and the only urgent one, What shall we do? we ponder this: How must we think? For thinking is genuine activity, genuine taking a hand, if to take a hand means to lend a hand to...the coming to presence of Being.

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors

If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.