Martin Heidegger Quotes

Enjoy the top 151 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Martin Heidegger.

“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”
— Martin Heidegger —

“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”

— Martin Heidegger

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.

— Martin Heidegger

“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.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

“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

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.

— Martin Heidegger

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.”

— Martin Heidegger

“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

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

— Martin Heidegger

“But what is great can only begin great.”

— Martin Heidegger

“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

“Questions are not happenstance thoughts nor are questions common problems of today which one picks up from hearsay and booklearning and decks out with a gesture of profundity questions grow out of confrontation with the subject matter and the subject matter is there only where eyes are, it is in this manner that questions will be posed and all the more considering that questions that have today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of problems. One stands up for nothing more than the normal running of the industry. Philosophy interprets its corruption as the resurrection of metaphysics.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

“If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the present-at-hand by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully. When concern holds back from any kind of producing, manipulating and the like, it puts itself into what is now the sole remaining mode of Being-in, the mode of just tarrying-alongside. In this kind of 'dwelling' as a holding-oneself-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-at-hand is consummated.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

“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.”

— Martin Heidegger

“All questions that do justice to the subject are themselves bridges to their own answering.”

— Martin Heidegger

“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.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

“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

“But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.
Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.
But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission.”

— Martin Heidegger

“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.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

“What is decision anyway?”

— Martin Heidegger

“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

The specific and unique presupposition for experimentation is, as remarkable as it may sound, that science become rational-mathematical, i.e., in the highest sense, not experimental. Initial positing of nature as such. Because modern "science" (physics) is mathematical (not empirical), it is necessarily experimental in

— Martin Heidegger

“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.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

“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

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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.

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

— Martin Heidegger

“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

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

“The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth”

— Martin Heidegger

“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”

— Martin Heidegger

“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

“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

“So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.”