Quotes from Martin Heidegger

Ein Zeug »ist« strenggenommen nie. Zum Sein von Zeug gehört je immer ein Zeugganzes, darin es dieses Zeug sein kann, das es ist. Zeug ist wesenhaft »etwas, um zu..«.

The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.

How many Germans live who speak their mother tongue effortlessly and yet are unable to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or one of Hölderlin's hymns! Hence whoever has mastered the Greek language, or has some acquaintance with it by accident or choice, possess not the least proof thereby that he is able to think according to the thought of a Greek thinker.

It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses [this something else]. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself.

What we come across is only this - various tunings of thinking. Doubt and despair, on the one hand, blind obsession by untested principles, on the other, conflict with one another. Fear and anxiety are mixed with hope and confidence. Often and widely, it looks as though thinking were a kind of reasoning conception and calculation completely free of any kind of tuning. But even the coldness of calculation, even the prosaic sobriety of planning are traits of an attunement.

But anyone who only expects thinking to give assurances, and awaits the day when we can go beyond it as unnecessary, is demanding that thought annihilate itself.

What we call happening, no matter whether in a narrower or wider sense, is movement, a becoming-other, a becoming.

The truth of beyng is the beyng of truth—said in this way, it sounds like an artificial and forced reversal and, at most, like a seduction to a dialectical game. In fact, this reversal is merely a fleeting and external sign of the turning which essentially occurs in beyng itself and which casts light on what might be meant here by "decision.

El deseo de una ética se vuelve tanto más apremiante cuanto más aumenta, hasta la desmesura, el desconcierto el hombre, tanto el manifiesto como el que permanece oculto.

Only by existing on the basis of metaphysics can science renew and fulfill its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose, in ever fresh ways, the whole realm of truth in both nature and history.

What is decision anyway?

The most frightful jubilation must be the dying of a god. Only the human being has the distinction of standing in front of death, because the human being is steadfastly in Beyng; death the highest testimony to Beyng.

Certainly, dialectic is a magnificent thing. But one never finds the dialectic, as if it were a mill which exists somewhere and into which one empties whatever one chooses, or whose mechanism one could modify according to taste and need.

Overman is the man who grounds Being anew-in the rigor of knowledge and in the grand style of creation.

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture.

But even assuming this: Language would be actually spoken according to all of its directions and possibilities, and were the thrust of an earthquake now immediately to take place so that the whole community was numbed mute by fear, would language then cease to be?

Ser significa habitar persistiendo a través de los espacios sobre la base de la permanencia junto a cosas y lugares.

Initially we understand nothing at all, and for this reason we ask.

Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment.

Für die Götter kommen wir zu spät und zu früh für das Seyn.

The specific and unique presupposition for experimentation is, as remarkable as it may sound, that science become rational-mathematical, i.e., in the highest sense, not experimental. Initial positing of nature as such. Because modern "science" (physics) is mathematical (not empirical), it is necessarily experimental in

As ek-sisting, man sustains Da-sein in that he takes the Da, the clearing of Being, into care.

Being is essentially different from a being, from beings.

As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities.