Martin Heidegger Quotes & Sayings

The truth of beyng is the beyng of truth - said in this way, it sounds like an artificial and forced reversal and, at most, like a seduction to a dialectical game. In fact, this reversal is merely a fleeting and external sign of the turning which essentially occurs in beyng itself and which casts light on what might be meant here by decision. — Martin Heidegger

But anyone who only expects thinking to give assurances, and awaits the day when we can go beyond it as unnecessary, is demanding that thought annihilate itself. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

What is decision anyway? — Martin Heidegger

Dasein itself
and this means also its Being-in-the-world
gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters 'within' its world, and from the Being which they possess. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered
technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes
accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all
Being of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a
people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph;
then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the
question: what for? - where to? - and what then? — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

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

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. — Martin Heidegger

We are too late for the gods and too early for Being. — Martin Heidegger

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

There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full. — Martin Heidegger

This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither. — Martin Heidegger

Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been. — Martin Heidegger

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 — Martin Heidegger

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

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

But "nowhere" does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already "there" - and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one's breath - and yet it is nowhere. — Martin Heidegger

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 pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand. — Martin Heidegger

But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.
Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.
But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission. — Martin Heidegger

To dwell is to garden. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

Questioning is the piety of thought. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

In its factical existence, any particular Dasein either 'has the time' or 'does not have it'. It either 'takes time' for something or 'cannot allow any time for it'. Why does Dasein 'take time', and why can it 'lose' it? Where does it take time from? How is this time related to Dasein's temporality? — Martin Heidegger

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 — Martin Heidegger

The meditation of inceptual thinking concerns us (ourselves) and yet does not. It does not concern us so as to bring out from us the prescriptive determinations; but it does concern us as historical beings and concerns us specifically in the plight of the abandonment by being (at first, decline in the understanding of being, and then forgetting of being). It concerns us, who thus are initially posited in our exposure amid beings; it concerns us in this manner in order that we find our way beyond ourselves to selfhood. — Martin Heidegger

The first beginning and its inceptuality The first beginning is the act of beginning in the sense of the disconcealing of disconcealment, but thus the emergence into the constancy of disconcealment in unconcealedness, but thus the appearing forth of the latter in the act of appearing, but thus the pressing forth of appearing as appearance, but thus the subjugation of unconcealedness, but thus the relinquishment of the inceptuality of the beginning, but thus the abandonment of the beginning to the advancement, but thus the commencement of the truth of being as the beingness of beings, but thus the priority of beings themselves as that which in the proper sense is present prior to presence. There is no "dialectic" here at all, neither that of being nor even that of the thinking about being. Essentially occurring here is the beginning of the first beginning and nothing besides this act of beginning. Recollection into this is already appropriation. — Martin Heidegger

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant. — Martin Heidegger

Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time. — Martin Heidegger

It probably depends on this Either/Or whether or not we will get beyond our talk about technology and finally arrive at a relation to its essential nature. For we must first of all respond to the nature of technology, and only afterward ask whether and how man might become its master. And that question may turn out to be nonsensical, because the essence of technology stems from the presence of what is present, that is, from the Being of beings - something of which man never is the master, of which he can at best be the servant. — Martin Heidegger

To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded 'academic freedom' will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative. It primarily meant lack of concern, arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept of the freedom of the German student is now brought back to its truth. Henceforth, the bond and service of German students will unfold from this truth. — Martin Heidegger

On this "way," if to keep falling down and getting up can be called a way, — Martin Heidegger

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

The song still remains which names the land over which it sings. — Martin Heidegger

Being' cannot be derived from higher concepts by definition, nor can it be presented through lower ones. But does this imply being no longer offers a problem? Not at all. We can infer only that 'Being' cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to Being the concept of 'definition' as presented in traditional logic, [ ... ] which, within certain limits, provides a justifiable way of characterizing 'entities'. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

The rigorousness of restraint is other than the one of the "exactitude" of a loose, indifferent "reasoning" which belongs equally to everyone and whose results are compelling within the sphere of its own claims to certainty. Such results are compelling, however, only because the claim to truth is content with the correctness that comes from deduction and from insertion into a regulated and calculable order. — Martin Heidegger

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

Historiology, always understood in its claim to possess the character of modern science, is a constant avoidance of history. Yet even in this avoidance, it still maintains a relation to history, and that makes historiology and the historiologist bivalent. If history is not explained historiologically and calculated in terms of a particular image for the specific ends of supporting a position and imparting a conviction, if history is instead placed back into the uniqueness of its inexplicability, and if, through this inexplicability, all historiological bustle and all the opinions and beliefs that arise from it are placed into question and into decision with respect to themselves, then what is being carried out is what could be called historical thinking. — Martin Heidegger

The last god has his own most unique uniqueness and stands outside of the calculative determination expressed in the labels "mono-theism," "pan-theism," and "a-theism." There has been "monotheism," and every other sort of "theism," only since the emergence of Judeo-Christian "apologetics," whose thinking presupposes "metaphysics." With the death of this God, all theisms wither away. The multiplicity of gods is not subject to enumeration but, instead, to the inner richness of the grounds and abysses in the site of the moment for the lighting up and concealment of the intimation of the last god. — Martin Heidegger

But what is great can only begin great. — Martin Heidegger

The one: how it is (what it, Being, is) and also how not-Being (is) impossible. This is the pathway of grounded trust, — Martin Heidegger

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

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there — Martin Heidegger

The term 'Being' does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the 'universality' of Being 'transcends' any universality of genus. — Martin Heidegger

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

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

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. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

It is indeed in no way settled that the "self" is ever determinable by means of a representation of the ego. Instead, it must be acknowledged that selfhood first arises out of the grounding of Da-sein, a grounding that is carried out as an appropriation of the belonging to the call. Accordingly, the openness and grounding of the self arise out of, and as, the truth of beyng — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

The possible ranks higher than the actual. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

The spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kenntnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

Being is an issue for one. — Martin Heidegger

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed. — Martin Heidegger

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

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. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

The nothing nothings. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

Has Dasein as itself ever freely decided, and will it ever be able to decide, whether it wants to come into "Dasein" or not? — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
To dwell is to garden. — Martin Heidegger

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 — Martin Heidegger

Then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself ... In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

The end, the last, the limit, that at which something stops, that whereby something is restricted to what it is. Restriction as enclosure in the current appearance. Restriction as highest and fulfilled exerting force. Restriction in the Greek sense as confinement within boundaries, ones which simultaneously merely let the restricted thing be seen and also delimit it against other ones, and - conceal it in its belongingness to them. Restriction a sort of concealment, especially if seen in terms of the pure presence of that which comes to presence, rather than in terms of the respective "this" in its individuation. — Martin Heidegger

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

The specific and unique presupposition for experimentation is, as remarkable as it may sound, that science become rational-mathematical, i.e., in the highest sense, not experimental. Initial positing of nature as such. Because modern "science" (physics) is mathematical (not empirical), it is necessarily experimental in — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting ... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. — Martin Heidegger

Nature has no history. — Martin Heidegger

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

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

Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise. — Martin Heidegger

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. — Martin Heidegger

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

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

Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot. — Martin Heidegger

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

To make of "the truth" a goddess amounts to turning the mere notion of something, namely the concept of the essence of truth, into a "personality. — Martin Heidegger