Martin Heidegger Quotes

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.

Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

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.

Nothing is everything that doesn't happen at this very moment.

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

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.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

How one encounters reality is a choice.

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.

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.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.

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

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

Being is only Being for Dasein.

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.

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

In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself - as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light - so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.

I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.

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.

We make a space inside ourselves, so that being can speak.

We do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily.

We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.

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

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

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.

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

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

Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.

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.

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.

Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny ... does true order grow.

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

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.

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

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

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.