Martin Heidegger: Trending quotes

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Martin Heidegger: 138 quotes63 likes

““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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.

“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)

“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

“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

“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.

“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.

“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