Martin Heidegger Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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 everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Heidegger