Top 116 Quotes & Sayings by Martin Heidegger

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Only a god can save us.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

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.

We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.

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

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

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

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

To dwell is to garden.

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

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

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

True time is four-dimensional.

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.

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

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.

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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

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.

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.

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

Questioning is the piety of thought.

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.

Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

Being is only Being for Dasein.

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

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

How one encounters reality is a choice.

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.

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