Martin Heidegger

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

— Martin Heidegger

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

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive god. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

— Martin Heidegger

Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

— Martin Heidegger

The grandeur of man is measured according to what he seeks and according to the urgency by which he remains a seeker.

— Martin Heidegger

The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous.

— Martin Heidegger

In its essence, technology is something that man does not control.

— Martin Heidegger

What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N.S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

— Martin Heidegger

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.

— 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 like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

— Martin Heidegger

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

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

— Martin Heidegger

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

— Martin Heidegger

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

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

— Martin Heidegger

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

For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely “What basic character do beings manifest?” or “How may the being of beings be characterized?” but “What is this ‘being’ itself?” The decisive question is that of “the meaning of being,” not merely that of the being of beings.

— Martin Heidegger

“To stamp becoming with the character of being—that is the supreme will to power.” (WM 617) This suggests that becoming only is if it is grounded in being as being: “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of being.”

— Martin Heidegger

Eternity, not as a static “now,” nor as a sequence of “nows” rolling off into the infinite, but as the “now” that bends back into itself. … Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.

— Martin Heidegger

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

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

In contrast to “Blessed are they who do not see and still believe,” he speaks of “seeing and still not believing.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

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.

— Martin Heidegger

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

Nietzsche understands the aesthetic state of the observer and recipient on the basis of the state of the creator. Thus the effect of the artwork is nothing else than a reawakening of the creator’s state in the one who enjoys the artwork. Observation of art follows in the wake of creation. Nietzsche says (SM, 821), “—the effect of artworks is arousal of the art-creating state, rapture.”

— Martin Heidegger

Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.

— 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

We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.

— Martin Heidegger

The word “art” does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

— Martin Heidegger

Who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthfulness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.

— Martin Heidegger

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.

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

But what about "time"? After all it is not a bundle in which past, future and present are wrapped up together. Time is not a cage in which the "no longer now," the "not yet now," and the "now" are cooped up together. How do matters stand with "time"? They stand thus: time goes. And it goes in that it passes away. The passing of time is, of course, a coming, but a coming which goes, in passing away. What comes in time never comes to stay, but to go. What comes in time always bears beforehand the mark of going past and passing away. This is why everything temporal is regarded simply as what is transitory.

— Martin Heidegger

Why do we say that time

— Martin Heidegger

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