“What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist
“What is a thing?”
is historical, because every report of the past, that is of the preliminaries to the question about the thing, is concerned with something static. This kind of historical reporting is an explicit shutting down of history, whereas it is, after all, a happening. We question historically if we ask what is still happening even if it seems to be past. We ask what is still happening and whether we remain equal to this happening so that it can really develop. p. 43
What Is A Thing? (1935, 1968)
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Do you have more details about the quote "What is a thing?" by Martin Heidegger?
Martin Heidegger69
German philosopher 1889–1976Related quotes
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet
Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.”
Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time
Source: Thief of Time
“What is this thing, "imagination?"”
David Mitchell (1969) English novelist
Interview in The Japan Times Online, (24 June 2007) https://archive.is/20121219091415/search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20070624a1.html <br class="br">Context: What is this thing, "imagination?" A muscle that can be "forced" or "stretched"? Or something immune to the ethos of ganbaru [grit it out, or strive for one's best]? Like the relativist's view of light, it is both wave and particle, depending on what you want it to be. The verb "to imagine" is both active and passive, as in "Steve imagined his future," and "Such a future was never imagined." So, I work on my novel by imagining the world of 18th-century Nagasaki and its people and their fears and desires, as an act of will, and a lot of will is involved, believe me. However, I could ganbaru until I'm blue in the face. If my imagination doesn't work "passively" or even "intransitively," at its own behest rather than mine, and come up with cliche-demolishing twists of phrase and turns of plot and happy accidents and unexpected reactions from characters, then the book will be sterile. Well-written with luck, and even intelligent, but sterile. (...) Imagination is what makes art fertile.