Top 160 Martin Heidegger Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “How one encounters reality is a choice.”

— Martin Heidegger

2. “Being is only Being for Dasein.”

— Martin Heidegger

3. “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”

— Martin Heidegger

4. “Tell me how you read and I’ll tell you who you are.”

— Martin Heidegger

5. “Only a god can save us.”

— Martin Heidegger

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6. “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.”

— Martin Heidegger

7. “Dasein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.”

— Martin Heidegger

8. “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”

— Martin Heidegger

9. “Questioning is the piety of thought.”

— Martin Heidegger

10. “Nothing is everything that doesn’t happen at this very moment.”

— Martin Heidegger

11. “A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.”

— Martin Heidegger

12. “The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”

— Martin Heidegger

13. “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?”

— Martin Heidegger

14. “Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”

— Martin Heidegger

15. “A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.”

— Martin Heidegger

16. “Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”

— Martin Heidegger

17. “Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”

— Martin Heidegger

18. “We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.”

— Martin Heidegger

19. “We make a space inside ourselves, so that being can speak.”

— Martin Heidegger

20. “So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.”

— Martin Heidegger

21. “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.”

— Martin Heidegger

22. “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”

— Martin Heidegger

23. “Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”

— Martin Heidegger

24. “What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.”

— Martin Heidegger

25. “Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.”

— Martin Heidegger

26. “The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

28. “To dwell is to garden.”

— Martin Heidegger

29. “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.”

— Martin Heidegger

30. “The possible ranks higher than the actual.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

32. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

33. “Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.”

— Martin Heidegger

34. “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky.”

— Martin Heidegger

35. “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”

— Martin Heidegger

36. “We do not “have” a body; rather, we “are” bodily.”

— Martin Heidegger

37. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

38. “Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.”

— Martin Heidegger

39. “In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.”

— Martin Heidegger

40. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

41. “We name time when we say: every thing has its time. This means: everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time.”

— Martin Heidegger

42. “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

44. “The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.”

— Martin Heidegger

45. “Transcendence constitutes selfhood.”

— Martin Heidegger

46. “The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.”

— Martin Heidegger

47. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

48. “To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.”

— Martin Heidegger

49. “The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.”

— Martin Heidegger

50. “Das Nichts nichtet.”

— Martin Heidegger