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Martin Heidegger Quotes

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century". Heidegger is best known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism, though as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautions, "his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification".

His first and best known book, Being and Time , though unfinished, is one of the central philosophical works of the 20th century. In the first division of the work, Heidegger attempted to turn away from "ontic" questions about beings to ontological questions about Being, and recover the most fundamental philosophical question: the question of Being, of what it means for something to be. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, namely, Human being, which he called Dasein . Heidegger argued that Dasein is defined by Care, its practically engaged and concernful mode of Being-in-the-world, in opposition to Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes who located the essence of man in our thinking abilities. For Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more fundamentally structured by its Temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to time, existing as a structurally open "possibility-for-being." He emphasized the importance of Authenticity in human existence, involving a truthful relationship to our thrownness into a world which we are "always already" concerned with, and to our Being-towards-death, the Finitude of the time and being we are given, and the closing down of our various possibilities for being through time.

Heidegger also made critical contributions to philosophical conceptions of truth, arguing that its original meaning was unconcealment, to philosophical analyses of art as a site of the revelation of truth, and to philosophical understanding of language as the "house of being." Heidegger's later work includes criticisms of technology's instrumentalist understanding in the Western tradition as "enframing," treating all of Nature as a "standing reserve" on call for human purposes. Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with Nazism, as Rector of the University of Freiburg for 11 months, before his resignation in April 1934, for which he neither apologized nor publicly expressed regret, although in private he called it "the biggest stupidity of his life" .

✵ 26. September 1889 – 26. May 1976
Martin Heidegger photo

Works
Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Letter on Humanism
Martin Heidegger
Introduction to Metaphysics
Introduction to Metaphysics
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger: 69   quotes 59   likes

Famous Martin Heidegger Quotes

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

Martin Heidegger

“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”

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.”

Martin Heidegger

“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”

Martin Heidegger book Contributions to Philosophy

Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) [Beitrage Zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)], notes of 1936–1938, as translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (1989)
Context: Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light.
Context: Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," ie, by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.

“Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question.”

Martin Heidegger book Introduction to Metaphysics

Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? Das ist die Frage.
What is Metaphysics? (1929), p. 110
Cf. Gottfried Leibniz, De rerum originatione radicali (1697)ː "cur aliquid potius extiterit quam nihil."
Source: Introduction to Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger Quotes about thinking

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

Martin Heidegger

Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken.
What is Called Thinking? [Was heisst Denken?] (1951–1952), as translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (1968)

“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

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 35

“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

Source: Basic Writings: 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

Martin Heidegger: Trending quotes

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

Martin Heidegger

Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic" (Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte "Probleme" der "Logik" (1984), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0253004381, p. 7)

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 127

Health , Truth , Perfection

“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
Life

Martin Heidegger Quotes

“Transcendence constitutes selfhood.”

Martin Heidegger

Essence of Ground (1929)

“The Geschick of being: a child that plays… Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why."”

Martin Heidegger

The Principle of Reason (1955–1956) as translated by Reginald Lilly (1991) <!-- Bloomington: Indiana UP -->
Context: The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

World

“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

Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.
Context: 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. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.

World

“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.”

Martin Heidegger book The Question Concerning Technology

The Question Concerning Technology (1954)
Context: 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.

Passion

“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 book Being and Time

Stambaugh translation
Source: Being and Time (1927)

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Introduction
Being and Time (1927)

“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
God , World , Singing , Time

“Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Source: Being and Time

Way

“This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it.
That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche’s teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” Philosophy of art means “aesthetics” for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.”

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 70

Beauty , Art , Question , Decision

““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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 19

World

“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

Four Lectures on Technology (1949)

Food , Country

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

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 30

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

Martin Heidegger Letter on Humanism

Letter on Humanism (1947)

Animals

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 50

Way

“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 book Being and Time

Macquarrie & Robinson translation
Being and Time (1927)

Understanding , Business , Problem

“The will to the “true world” in the sense of Plato and Christianity … is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.”

Martin Heidegger

...der Wille zur »wahren Welt« im Sinne Platons und des Christentums … ist in Wahrheit ein Neinsagen zu unserer hiesigen Welt, in der gerade die Kunst heimisch ist.
Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 74

Truth , World , Art , Home

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 18

Question , Decision

“Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Der Tod ist die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit.
Macquarrie & Robinson translation
Being and Time (1927)

Death

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 4

Thinking , Decision

““For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy.” (XIV, 24) Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? … “The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection—all obviously states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence.” (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add that thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself.”

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 5

Thinking , Animals , Perfection

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 20

Thinking , Time

“Today we decide about metaphysics and about even more elevated things at philosophy conferences. For everything that is to be done these days we must first have a meeting, and here is how it works: people come together, constantly come together, and they all wait for one another to turn up so that the others will tell them how it is, and if it doesn’t get said, never mind, everyone has had their say. It may very well be that all the talkers who are having their say have understood little of the matter in question, but still we believe that if we accumulate all that misunderstanding something like understanding will leap forth at the end of the day. Thus there are people today who travel from one meeting to the next and who are sustained by the confidence that something is really happening, that they’ve actually done something; whereas, at bottom, they’ve merely ducked out of work, seeking in chatter a place to build a nest for their helplessness—a helplessness, it is true, that they will never understand.”

Martin Heidegger

Gesamtausgabe, 20:376, as translated by David Farrell Krell in Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), p. 101

People , Travel , Confidence , Understanding

“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

The Essence of Truth, 1931-32

“Being is only Being for Dasein”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Macquarrie & Robinson translation
Being and Time (1927)

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 119

Time

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 26

History , Time

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 125

Beauty , Thinking , Light , Passion

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

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 117

“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

Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.

Home , History , Literature

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

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 99

“If beings are grasped as will to power, the “should” which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a “should” does not determine being. Being determines a “should.” “When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values.””

Martin Heidegger

VIII, 89

p. 32
Nietzsche (1961)

Life

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 117

Art , Understanding

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

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 125

Art

“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

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 26

“In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.”

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. xxxix

“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

Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by William Richardson in Risk and Meaning, Nicolas Bouleau (translated by Dené Oglesby and Martin Crossley), ed. Springer, 2011 ISBN 978-3-642-17646-3, page 102.

People , World , Past , Help

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

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Stambaugh translation
Being and Time (1927)

“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 book Introduction to Metaphysics

Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) — a publication of lectures of 1935.

Truth , Fish , Sea

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

Martin Heidegger

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 78

Art , Feeling

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

Martin Heidegger

Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger, 1966

“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 book Being and Time

Stambaugh translation
Being and Time (1927)

World , Way

“We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Macquarrie & Robinson translation, ¶9
Being and Time (1927)

“Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness.”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Being and Time (1927)

Search , Question

“It is said that "being" is the most universal and the emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it.”

Martin Heidegger book Being and Time

Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Being and Time (1927)

Universe , Understanding

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