Martin Heidegger Quotes

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Art is not just one among a number of items, activities one engages in and enjoys now and then; art places the whole of Dasein in decision and keeps it there. For that reason art itself is subject to altogether singular conditions.

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

Martin Heidegger
In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

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. 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.

Martin Heidegger
Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.

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
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
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
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
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
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
Far from being, in fact, a commonplace event, death means our last opportunity, the core of our being.

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

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
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."

Martin Heidegger
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 aiôn? 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.

Martin Heidegger
We shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it.

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

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

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
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
Eternity, not as a static now, nor as a sequence of nows rolling off into the infinite, but as the now that bends back into itself. … Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.

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

Martin Heidegger
For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy. (XIV, 24) Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? … The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection—all obviously states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence. (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add that thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself.

Martin Heidegger
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.

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