Top 160 Martin Heidegger Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a footing in the real. It is for its reality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the real, arising from it and returning to it.”

— Martin Heidegger

103. “Turning away from a flight from death, you see a horizon of opportunity that puts you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakeable joy.”

— Martin Heidegger

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy today. But – is there anything at all left today in which man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he understands “interest”?”

— Martin Heidegger

107. “To say philosophy originates in wonder means philosophy is wondrous in its essence and becomes more wondrous the more it becomes what it really is.”

— Martin Heidegger

108. “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

109. “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

110. “The greatest nearness of the last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding, is elevated into refusal. The latter is essentially other than sheer absence. Refusal, as belonging to the event, can be experienced only on the basis of the more originary essence of beyng as lit up in the thinking.”

— Martin Heidegger

111. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.”

— Martin Heidegger

112. “There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full.”

— Martin Heidegger

113. “The song still remains which names the land over which it sings.”

— Martin Heidegger

114. “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”

— Martin Heidegger

115. “We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

117. “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”

— Martin Heidegger

118. “But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.”

— Martin Heidegger

119. “The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.”

— Martin Heidegger

120. “I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.”

— Martin Heidegger

121. “Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.”

— Martin Heidegger

122. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

123. “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

124. “A man’s first bond is that which ties him into the national community.”

— Martin Heidegger

125. “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”?”

— Martin Heidegger

126. “But what is great can only begin great.”

— Martin Heidegger

127. “But “nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already “there” – and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one’s breath – and yet it is nowhere.”

— Martin Heidegger

128. “Das Fragen baut an einem Weg.”

— Martin Heidegger

129. “Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato’s time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of Being.”

— Martin Heidegger

130. “Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time.”

— Martin Heidegger

131. “Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being. But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of Being.”

— Martin Heidegger

132. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

133. “The idolizers of “facts” never realize that their idols shine only in a borrowed light. They are indeed not supposed to realize that, for it would immediately make them perplexed and, accordingly, useless. But idolizers and idols are used only when the gods are absconding and so are announcing their nearness.”

— Martin Heidegger

134. “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?”

— Martin Heidegger

135. “To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative. It primarily meant lack of concern, arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept of the freedom of the German student is now brought back to its truth. Henceforth, the bond and service of German students will unfold from this truth.”

— Martin Heidegger

136. “Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought... Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension of the holy. Perhaps that is the only unholy malignancy.”

— Martin Heidegger

137. “Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened.”

— Martin Heidegger

138. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

139. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

140. “The divinity of the gods must first eventuate before a god appears and before the naming word, which names “the gods”, can be heard.”

— Martin Heidegger

141. “On this “way,” if to keep falling down and getting up can be called a way, it is always and only the same question of the “meaning of beyng” that is asked.”

— Martin Heidegger

142. “Speaking a lot about something does not in the least guarantee that understanding is thus furthered. On the contrary, talking at great length about something covers things over and brings what is understood into an illusory clarity, that is, the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be mute... one who is mute still has the tendency to “speak.”... Authentic silence is possible only in genuine discourse. In order to be silent, Dasein must have something to say.”

— Martin Heidegger

143. “Has Dasein as itself ever freely decided, and will it ever be able to decide, whether it wants to come into “Dasein” or not?”

— Martin Heidegger

144. “The meeting of the solitary ones can happen only in solitude.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

146. “Everything has always already been said. And yet this “same” possesses, as its inner truth, the inexhaustable wealth of what is on every day as if that day were its first.”

— Martin Heidegger

147. “Man obviously is a being. As such he belongs to the totality of Being – just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. But man’s distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this.”

— Martin Heidegger

148. “All metaphysics, including its opponent, positivism, speaks the language of Plato. The basic word of its thinking, that is, of its presentation of the Being of beings, is eidos, idea: the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves. Outward appearance, however, is a manner of presence. No outward appearance without light – Plato already knew this. But there is no light and no brightness without the clearing. Even darkness needs it.”

— Martin Heidegger

149. “In the popular view, and according to the common notion, Nietzsche is the revolutionary figure who negated, destroyed and prophesied. To be sure, all that belongs to the image we have of him. Nor is it merely a role that he played, but an innermost necessity of his time. But what is essential in the revolutionary is not that he overturns as such; it is rather that in overturning he brings to light what is decisive and essential.”

— Martin Heidegger

150. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger