Martin Heidegger Quotes - Page 2

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

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

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.

Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build

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.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

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

Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.

To dwell is to garden.

he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors

Being is an issue for one.

Being is only Being for Dasein.

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.

Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a being.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.

The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

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.

Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny ... does true order grow.

Spiritual superiority [consists in] deep dedication ... in the form of the most rigorous training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love.

A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.