Martin Heidegger: Thought

“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 , Time

“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

World , Star , Thinking

“he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors”

Martin Heidegger

Error , Thinking

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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