Martin Heidegger - Beings Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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