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.

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.

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

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

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

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.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

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

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.

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

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

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

Only a god can save us.

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

I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.

To dwell is to garden.

Spiritual superiority [consists in] deep dedication ... in the form of the most rigorous training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love.

The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control

truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.

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.

A man's first bond is that which ties him into the national community.

he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors