Martin Heidegger Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

Martin Heidegger
We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.

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

Martin Heidegger
Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.

Martin Heidegger
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.

Martin Heidegger
Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

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 average, vague understanding of being can be permeated by traditional theories and opinions about being in such a way that these theories, as the sources of the prevailing understanding, remain hidden.

Martin Heidegger
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.

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

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

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
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.

Martin Heidegger
Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics.

Martin Heidegger
Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question.

Martin Heidegger
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.

Martin Heidegger
Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.

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

Martin Heidegger
To stamp becoming with the character of being—that is the supreme will to power. (WM 617) This suggests that becoming only is if it is grounded in being as being: That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of being.

Martin Heidegger
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.

Martin Heidegger
Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.

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
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
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