Top 160 Martin Heidegger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world’s formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.”

— Martin Heidegger

52. “I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.”

— Martin Heidegger

53. “True time is four-dimensional.”

— Martin Heidegger

54. “The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.”

— Martin Heidegger

55. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

56. “The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom.”

— Martin Heidegger

57. “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”

— Martin Heidegger

58. “We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

60. “Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?”

— Martin Heidegger

61. “Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

63. “Nature has no history.”

— Martin Heidegger

64. “Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.”

— Martin Heidegger

65. “In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself – as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light – so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.”

— Martin Heidegger

66. “In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

68. “In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.”

— Martin Heidegger

69. “What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.”

— Martin Heidegger

70. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

71. “The moving force in Showing of Saying is Owning. It is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own, from where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind. This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing in its showing we call Appropriation. It yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal.”

— Martin Heidegger

72. “Mere anxiety is the source of everything.”

— Martin Heidegger

73. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

74. “Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.”

— Martin Heidegger

75. “A resounding of the authentic word can arise only from silence.”

— Martin Heidegger

76. “The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.”

— Martin Heidegger

77. “The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.”

— Martin Heidegger

78. “For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.”

— Martin Heidegger

79. “He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment.”

— Martin Heidegger

80. “If in Nietzsche’s thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.”

— Martin Heidegger

81. “Iedereen is de ander, en niemand is zichzelf.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

83. “Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise.”

— Martin Heidegger

84. “The average, vague understanding of being can be permeated by traditional theories and opinions about being in such a way that these theories, as the sources of the prevailing understanding, remain hidden.”

— Martin Heidegger

85. “All questions that do justice to the subject are themselves bridges to their own answering.”

— Martin Heidegger

86. “We would like only, for once, to get to where we are already.”

— Martin Heidegger

87. “Der Mensch versucht vergeblich, durch sein Planen den Erdball in eine Ordnung zu bringen, wenn er nicht dem Zuspruch des Feldweges eingeordnet ist.”

— Martin Heidegger

88. “How should the new day arrive, if the night is withheld from it and everything is suppressed into the twilight of decisionlessness?”

— Martin Heidegger

89. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

90. “Each one of us is what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we care of.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

92. “Language speaks and not the human.”

— Martin Heidegger

93. “Das Fragen baut an einem Weg.”

— Martin Heidegger

94. “In its factical existence, any particular Dasein either ‘has the time’ or ‘does not have it’. It either ‘takes time’ for something or ‘cannot allow any time for it’. Why does Dasein ‘take time’, and why can it ‘lose’ it? Where does it take time from? How is this time related to Dasein’s temporality?”

— Martin Heidegger

95. “When we say something about something, we make it lie there before us, which means at the same time to make it appear.”

— Martin Heidegger

96. “The things for which we owe thanks are not things we have from ourselves. They are given to us. We receive many gifts, of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it. That is why we owe thanks for this endowment, first and unceasingly.”

— Martin Heidegger

97. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

98. “The thinker only responded to what addressed itself to him.”

— Martin Heidegger

99. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger