Quotes from Martin Heidegger

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

The African Sahara is only one kind of wasteland. The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men.

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive god. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

Expelled from the truth of Being, man everywhere circles around himself as the animal rationale.

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.

Our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner.

The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him.

?ó??—gleam, shine, radiance Emerging out of itself and yet remaining with itself—continuously radiating out from itself and yet nothing given away or lost. Gleaming—shining not only away from itself and an emergence, but also beckoning back into something dark, concealed, inaccessible. Shining—the radiance of the self-concealing.

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 for in the face of the God who is absent, we founder. Only a God can save us.

Echte Erinnerung ist Zuwendung zum unerschlossenen Inwendigen des Gewesenen. Echtes Erinnern ist ein Ahnen.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

If God, as the supra-sensory ground and goal, of all reality, is dead; if the supra-sensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory, and above it, its vitalizing and up-building power, then nothing more remains to which Man can cling, and by which he can orient himself.

the wonder that this 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.

No historical movement can leap outside of history and start from scratch.

On this "way," if to keep falling down and getting up can be called a way

Humans act as though we were the creators and masters of language, while in fact language remains the master of us. Perhaps it is, before all else, humankind's distortion of this relation of dominance that drives our nature into alienation.

Language is neither merely the field of expression, nor merely the means of expression, nor merely the two jointly. Thought and poesy never just use language to express themselves with its help; rather, thought and poesy are in themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech that language speaks through the mouth of man.

Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek.

La conciencia habla única y constantemente en la modalidad del silencio. (§ 56)

Es kann sein, daß wir eines Tages aus unserer Alltäglichkeit herausrücken und in die Macht der Dichtung einrücken müssen, daß wir nie mehr so in die Alltäglichkeit zurückkehren, wie wir sie verlassen haben.

Every valuing, even when it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets being: be valid – solely as the objects of its doing.

In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of the character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.

On ne peut entreprendre de définir l'être sans tomber dans cette absurdité: car on ne peut définir un mot sans commencer par celui-ci, c'est, soit qu'on l'exprime ou qu'on le sous-entende. Donc pour définir l'être, il faudrait dire c'est, et ainsi employer le mot défini dans sa définition.

En tanto el tiempo es en cada caso mío, existen muchos tiempos. El tiempo carece de sentido; el tiempo es temporal