Martin Heidegger Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Martin Heidegger
In its essence, technology is something that man does not control.

Martin Heidegger
In contrast to Blessed are they who do not see and still believe, he speaks of seeing and still not believing.

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
Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

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
Nietzsche understands the aesthetic state of the observer and recipient on the basis of the state of the creator. Thus the effect of the artwork is nothing else than a reawakening of the creator's state in the one who enjoys the artwork. Observation of art follows in the wake of creation. Nietzsche says (SM, 821), —the effect of artworks is arousal of the art-creating state, rapture.

Martin Heidegger
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.

Martin Heidegger
Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.

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

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 like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

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
We are too late for the gods and too
Early for the being. Being's a poem,
Just begun, is man.

Martin Heidegger
The word art does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

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
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
What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N. S. [National Socialism], 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.

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
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
For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely What basic character do beings manifest? or How may the being of beings be characterized? but What is this 'being' itself? The decisive question is that of the meaning of being, not merely that of the being of beings.

Martin Heidegger
If beings are grasped as will to power, the should which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a should does not determine being. Being determines a should. When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values.

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
The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

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

Martin Heidegger
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.

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