Martin Heidegger Quotes

Always and everywhere the message of the same rests on the pathway:
The simple preserves the puzzle of what remains and what is just. Spontaneously it enters men and needs a lengthy growth. With the unpretentiousness of the ever-same it hides its blessing. The breadth of all growing things which rest along the pathway bestows the world. In what remains unsaid in their speech is - as Eckardt, the old master of letters and life, says - God, only God.

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.

As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.

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.

The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.

The one: how it is (what it, Being, is) and also how not-Being (is) impossible. This is the pathway of grounded trust,

Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.

No historical movement can leap outside of history and start from scratch.

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

One expects philosophy to promote, and even to accelerate, the practical and technical business of culture by alleviating it, making it easier. {9}

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.

The truth of beyng is the beyng of truth - said in this way, it sounds like an artificial and forced reversal and, at most, like a seduction to a dialectical game. In fact, this reversal is merely a fleeting and external sign of the turning which essentially occurs in beyng itself and which casts light on what might be meant here by decision.

The meditation of inceptual thinking concerns us (ourselves) and yet does not. It does not concern us so as to bring out from us the prescriptive determinations; but it does concern us as historical beings and concerns us specifically in the plight of the abandonment by being (at first, decline in the understanding of being, and then forgetting of being). It concerns us, who thus are initially posited in our exposure amid beings; it concerns us in this manner in order that we find our way beyond ourselves to selfhood.

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

Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness.

(essay : Hölderlin And The Essence Of Poetry, chapter from my copy of The origin of the work of art)

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
To dwell is to garden.

What could be more alien to the "they", lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the "nothing"?

Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy today. But - is there anything at all left today in which man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he understands "interest"?

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

Only a god can save us.

Dasein itself
and this means also its Being-in-the-world
gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters 'within' its world, and from the Being which they possess.

Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time.

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

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

Then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself ... In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself.

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

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.

Historiology, always understood in its claim to possess the character of modern science, is a constant avoidance of history. Yet even in this avoidance, it still maintains a relation to history, and that makes historiology and the historiologist bivalent. If history is not explained historiologically and calculated in terms of a particular image for the specific ends of supporting a position and imparting a conviction, if history is instead placed back into the uniqueness of its inexplicability, and if, through this inexplicability, all historiological bustle and all the opinions and beliefs that arise from it are placed into question and into decision with respect to themselves, then what is being carried out is what could be called historical thinking.

As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.

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.

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 pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

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

This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.

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.

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

To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded 'academic freedom' will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative. It primarily meant lack of concern, arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept of the freedom of the German student is now brought back to its truth. Henceforth, the bond and service of German students will unfold from this truth.

It is indeed in no way settled that the "self" is ever determinable by means of a representation of the ego. Instead, it must be acknowledged that selfhood first arises out of the grounding of Da-sein, a grounding that is carried out as an appropriation of the belonging to the call. Accordingly, the openness and grounding of the self arise out of, and as, the truth of beyng

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

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.

The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.

Language is the house of Being.

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.

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.

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.

the more concretely I am in the world, the more genuine the existence of deception.

The first beginning and its inceptuality The first beginning is the act of beginning in the sense of the disconcealing of disconcealment, but thus the emergence into the constancy of disconcealment in unconcealedness, but thus the appearing forth of the latter in the act of appearing, but thus the pressing forth of appearing as appearance, but thus the subjugation of unconcealedness, but thus the relinquishment of the inceptuality of the beginning, but thus the abandonment of the beginning to the advancement, but thus the commencement of the truth of being as the beingness of beings, but thus the priority of beings themselves as that which in the proper sense is present prior to presence. There is no "dialectic" here at all, neither that of being nor even that of the thinking about being. Essentially occurring here is the beginning of the first beginning and nothing besides this act of beginning. Recollection into this is already appropriation.

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

In its factical existence, any particular Dasein either 'has the time' or 'does not have it'. It either 'takes time' for something or 'cannot allow any time for it'. Why does Dasein 'take time', and why can it 'lose' it? Where does it take time from? How is this time related to Dasein's temporality?

Nature has no history.

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

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

The things for which we owe thanks are not things we have from ourselves. They are given to us. We receive many gifts, of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it. That is why we owe thanks for this endowment, first and unceasingly.

On this "way," if to keep falling down and getting up can be called a way,

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.

When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.

[I]n the name 'being-in-the-world,' 'world' does not in any way imply earthly as opposed to heavenly being, nor the 'worldly' as opposed to the 'spiritual.' For us 'world' does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the openness of Being. Man is, and is man, insofar as he is the ek-sisting one. He stands out into the openness of Being. Being itself, which as the throw has projected the essence of man into 'care,' is as this openness. Thrown in such fashion, man stands 'in' the openness of Being. 'World' is the clearing of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown essence. 'Being-in-the-world' designates the essence of ek-sistence with regard to the cleared dimension out of which the 'ek-' of ek-sistence essentially unfolds. Thought in terms of ek-sistence, 'world' is in a certain sense precisely 'the beyond' within existence and for it. Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a 'subject,' whether this is taken as 'I' or 'We.' Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject-object relation. Rather, before all this, man in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the open region that clears the 'between' within which a 'relation' of subject to object can 'be

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

The last god has his own most unique uniqueness and stands outside of the calculative determination expressed in the labels "mono-theism," "pan-theism," and "a-theism." There has been "monotheism," and every other sort of "theism," only since the emergence of Judeo-Christian "apologetics," whose thinking presupposes "metaphysics." With the death of this God, all theisms wither away. The multiplicity of gods is not subject to enumeration but, instead, to the inner richness of the grounds and abysses in the site of the moment for the lighting up and concealment of the intimation of the last god.

A resounding of the authentic word can arise only from silence

The rigorousness of restraint is other than the one of the "exactitude" of a loose, indifferent "reasoning" which belongs equally to everyone and whose results are compelling within the sphere of its own claims to certainty. Such results are compelling, however, only because the claim to truth is content with the correctness that comes from deduction and from insertion into a regulated and calculable order.

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.

The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies ... they tell us nothing about entities in their Being.

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

To make of "the truth" a goddess amounts to turning the mere notion of something, namely the concept of the essence of truth, into a "personality.

Speaking is known as the articulated vocalization of thought by means of the organs of speech. But speaking is at the same time also listening. It is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one man speaks, the other listens. But listening accompanies and surrounds not only speaking such as takes place in conversation. The simultaneousness of speaking and listening has a larger meaning. Speaking is of itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language which we speak. Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking. This listening to language also comes before all other kinds of listening that we know, in a most inconspicuous manner. We do not merely speak the language - we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking.

He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment.

Expelled from the truth of Being, man everywhere circles around himself as the animal rationale.

Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the 'Oh, yes' and the 'Oh, no' of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring. But those daring ones sustained by that on which they expend themselves - in order thus to preserve the ultimate grandeur of existence.

Let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves

As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities.

Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the "thou" in the transparent, but "incomprehensible" revelation of the "just there". That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.

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

The end, the last, the limit, that at which something stops, that whereby something is restricted to what it is. Restriction as enclosure in the current appearance. Restriction as highest and fulfilled exerting force. Restriction in the Greek sense as confinement within boundaries, ones which simultaneously merely let the restricted thing be seen and also delimit it against other ones, and - conceal it in its belongingness to them. Restriction a sort of concealment, especially if seen in terms of the pure presence of that which comes to presence, rather than in terms of the respective "this" in its individuation.

Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.

Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch 'of life' - one which is somehow present-at-hand - with the phases of its momentary actualities. It stretches itself along in such a way that its own being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along. The 'between' which relates to birth and death already lies in the being of Dasein … It is by no means the case that Dasein 'is' actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is 'surrounded' by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood existentially, birth is not … something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of being of something … not yet present-at-hand but coming along … Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the 'ends' and their 'between' *are*, and they are in the only way possible on the basis of Dasein's being as *care* … As care, Dasein is the 'between'.

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

The greatest nearness of the last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding, is elevated into refusal. The latter is essentially other than sheer absence. Refusal, as belonging to the event, can be experienced only on the basis of the more originary essence of beyng as lit up in the thinking

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

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

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.

Body', 'soul', and 'spirit' may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limits their ontological indefiniteness may not be important. When, however, we come to the question of man's Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess
kinds of being whose nature has not as yet been determined. And even if we should attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed.

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.

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.

To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will. But inasmuch as man, because of his nature as the thinking animal and by virtue of forming ideas, is related to beings in their Being, is thereby related to Being, and is thus determined by Being - therefore man's being, in keeping with this relatedness of Being (which now means, of the will) to human nature, must emphatically appear as a willing.

A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.

There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

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

There is much talk nowadays of blood and soil [Blut und Boden] as frequently invoked powers. Literati, whom one comes across even today, have already seized hold of them. Blood and soil are certainly powerful and necessary, but they are not a sufficient condition for the Dasein of a people.

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

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

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.

All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming.

When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered
technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes
accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all
Being of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a
people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph;
then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the
question: what for? - where to? - and what then?

It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is replaced by a solipsism en deux in the I-thou relationship. As a relationship between Dasein and Dasein this has its possibility only on the basis of being-in-the-world. Put otherwise, being-in-the-world is with equal originality both being-with and being-among.

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise.

All distances in time and space are shrinking. […] Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance. What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on radio, can remain far from us. What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near to us. […] Everything gets lumped together into uniform distanceless. […] What is it that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.