Martin Heidegger Quotes

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. The nature of art would then be this: the truth of being setting itself to work.

The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home...By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world's worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted and withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which the world worlds...All coming to presence...keeps itself concealed to the last.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

Being is an issue for one.

True time is four-dimensional.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.

The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.

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

But what is great can only begin great.

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

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.

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

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.

The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there

We would like only, for once, to get to where we are already.

Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build

Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.

A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.

The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they must and should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things.

Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

Since time itself is not movement, it must somehow have to do with movement.Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable, change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change? Does it here give itself as itself in what it is? Can an axplacation of time starts here guarantee that time will thereby provide as it were the fundamental phenomena that determine it in its own being?

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.

Only a god can save us.

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.

Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.

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

We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.

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

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

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth

The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass

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

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

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.

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

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

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.

How one encounters reality is a choice.

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

I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.

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.