Martin Heidegger Quotes

Martin Heidegger offers deep, puzzling reflections on being, truth, and everyday life that will make you think hard.

34 quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.'

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

4. The possible ranks higher than the actual.

5. 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.

6. Being is only Being for Dasein

7. 'Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy' (from Contributions to Philosophy from Enowning, full quote:

8. 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.

9. ...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. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering Untergang for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.

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

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

12. Language is the house of the truth of Being.

13. Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

14. 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 [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

15. 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.

16. Why is there Being at all, and not much rather Nothing? That is the question.'

17. The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aion? It plays, because it plays. The 'because? withers away in the play. The play is without 'why.' It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this 'simply' is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

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

19. 'I could seat guests as they come, chatting not about Heidegger, but wine!'

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

21. 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.

22. I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.

23. The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies…they tell us nothing about entities in their Being.

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

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

26. 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.

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

28. In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

29. 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.

30. Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

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