Martin Heidegger Quotations

Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a being.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

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.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

We name time when we say: every thing has its time. This means: everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time.

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

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

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

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

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

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

Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

So it's clear from whence the history of philosophy is the inner movement of the course of spirit, that is, of absolute subjectivity, towards itself.

...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.

Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.

A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.

Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.

Nothing is everything that doesn't happen at this very moment.

A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.

I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.

Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

We do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily.

How one encounters reality is a choice.

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

Body', 'soul', and 'spirit' may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limits their ontological indefiniteness may not be important. When, however, we come to the question of man's Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess--kinds of being whose nature has not as yet been determined. And even if we should attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed.

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.

Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny ... does true order grow.

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.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

Being is only Being for Dasein

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build

Spiritual superiority [consists in] deep dedication ... in the form of the most rigorous training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love.

We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.

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.

Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.

Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.

A man's first bond is that which ties him into the national community.

What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S., but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

To dwell is to garden.

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees.

In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control

In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world.

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth

In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself - as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light - so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor.

The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home...By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world's worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted and withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which the world worlds...All coming to presence...keeps itself concealed to the last.

I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years

truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.

Only a god can save us.

Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?

he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.

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.

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth

A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.

In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. The nature of art would then be this: the truth of being setting itself to work.

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

Questions are not happenstance thoughts nor are questions common problems of today which one picks up from hearsay and booklearning and decks out with a gesture of profundity questions grow out of confrontation with the subject matter and the subject matter is there only where eyes are, it is in this manner that questions will be posed and all the more considering that questions that have today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of problems. One stands up for nothing more than the normal running of the industry. Philosophy interprets its corruption as the resurrection of metaphysics.

Form displays the relation [to beings] itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open.

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.

The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they must and should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things.

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.

What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

We would like only, for once, to get to where we are already.