Quotes from Martin Heidegger

The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies....they tell us nothing about entities in their Being.

As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.

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.

Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.

Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatuses of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in its essence. The rule of enframing threatens humanity with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.

As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.

Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness. (essay : Hölderlin And The Essence Of Poetry, chapter from my copy of The origin of the work of art)

Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht.

Only a god can save us.

To make of the truth a goddess amounts to turning the mere notion of something, namely the concept of the essence of truth, into a personality.

Nature has no history.

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. Die Denkenden und Dichtenden sind die Wächter dieser Behausung. Ihr Wachen ist das Vollbringen der Offenbarkeit des Seins, insofern sie diese durch ihr Sagen zur Sprache bringen und in der Sprache aufbewahren.

The term 'Being' does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the 'universality' of Being 'transcends' any universality of genus.

What could be more alien to the they, lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown in the nothing?

We never come to thoughts. They come to us.

Nothing is everything that doesn't happen at this very moment.

To dwell is to garden.

This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.

Do we know ourselves—our "self"? How are we supposed to be ourselves if we are not our selves? And how can we be our selves without knowing who we are, such that we are certain of being the ones we are?

Nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the god's withdrawal.

Being' cannot be derived from higher concepts by definition, nor can it be presented through lower ones. But does this imply being no longer offers a problem? Not at all. We can infer only that 'Being' cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to Being the concept of 'definition' as presented in traditional logic, [...] which, within certain limits, provides a justifiable way of characterizing 'entities'.

All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming.

A resounding of the authentic word can arise only from silence