Top 100 Martin Heidegger Sayings
#1. This happened not once, but twice - first with Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, and then with his pupil Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (We discuss Sartre in the next section.)
Christopher Panza
#2. Only where there is language is there world.
- Martin Heidegger
Louis Koster
#3. Let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves
Martin Heidegger
#5. 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
#6. 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
Martin Heidegger
#8. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#9. We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.
Martin Heidegger
#10. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#12. But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.
Martin Heidegger
#15. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#16. 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
#17. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#18. The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.
Martin Heidegger
#19. 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
Martin Heidegger
#20. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.
Martin Heidegger
#22. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment.
Martin Heidegger
#23. 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
#25. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#26. A man's first bond is that which ties him into the national community.
Martin Heidegger
#27. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#28. The one: how it is (what it, Being, is) and also how not-Being (is) impossible. This is the pathway of grounded trust,
Martin Heidegger
#29. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#32. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#34. Do we know ourselves - our "self"? How are we supposed to be ourselves if we are not our selves? And how can we be our selves without knowing who we are, such that we are certain of being the ones we are?
Martin Heidegger
#35. As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.
Martin Heidegger
#36. Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.
Martin Heidegger
#37. In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.
Martin Heidegger
#40. To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.
Martin Heidegger
#41. The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
Martin Heidegger
#42. A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
Martin Heidegger
#43. 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
#44. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#45. The term 'Being' does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the 'universality' of Being 'transcends' any universality of genus.
Martin Heidegger
#46. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Martin Heidegger
#47. This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
Martin Heidegger
#48. Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.
Martin Heidegger
#49. Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.
Martin Heidegger
#50. So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.
Martin Heidegger
#52. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#53. A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.
Martin Heidegger
#56. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.
Martin Heidegger
#57. 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?
Martin Heidegger
#58. 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
#59. Has Dasein as itself ever freely decided, and will it ever be able to decide, whether it wants to come into "Dasein" or not?
Martin Heidegger
#60. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.
Martin Heidegger
#61. The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.
Martin Heidegger
#62. The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
Martin Heidegger
#63. 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
#65. Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed
more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.
Martin Heidegger
#67. Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.
Martin Heidegger
#68. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#69. We make a space inside ourselves, so that being can speak.
Martin Heidegger
#70. 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
#72. When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.
Martin Heidegger
#73. The song still remains which names the land over which it sings.
Martin Heidegger
#74. The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.
Martin Heidegger
#75. Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.
Martin Heidegger
#76. The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
To dwell is to garden.
Martin Heidegger
#77. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting ... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.
Martin Heidegger
#79. The thoughtless habit of using the words "existence" and "exist" as designations for being is one more indication of our estrangement both from being and from a radical, forceful, and definite exegesis of being.
Martin Heidegger
#80. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#81. If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
Martin Heidegger
#83. I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.
Martin Heidegger
#84. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#85. Nothing is everything that doesn't happen at this very moment.
Martin Heidegger
#87. I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.
Martin Heidegger
#88. 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
Martin Heidegger
#89. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#90. 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
#91. We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.
Martin Heidegger
#92. Truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.
Martin Heidegger
#93. Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.
Martin Heidegger
#94. 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.
Martin Heidegger
#95. The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.
Martin Heidegger
#96. All questions that do justice to the subject are themselves bridges to their own answering.
Martin Heidegger
#97. Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.
Martin Heidegger
#98. A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.
Martin Heidegger
#99. On this "way," if to keep falling down and getting up can be called a way,
Martin Heidegger
#100. 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.
Martin Heidegger
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
