Top 160 Martin Heidegger Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Das Fragen baut an einem Weg.”

— Martin Heidegger

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Martin Heidegger

122. “We never come to thoughts. They come to us.”

— Martin Heidegger

123. “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

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

— Martin Heidegger

125. “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

126. “Nietzsche did track down Platonism in its most covert form: Christianity and its secularizations are thoroughly “Platonism for the people”.”

— Martin Heidegger

127. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

135. “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

136. “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

137. “Through the old word bauen, we fnd the answer: ich bin really means I dwell. The way in which I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.”

— Martin Heidegger

138. “In der Region, in der alles, was gefunden wird, im Lichte der Ursache-Wirkungs-Beziehung dargestellt wird, kann selbst Gott seine Heiligkeit und Herrlichkeit und all die Geheimnis seiner Distanz verlieren.”

— Martin Heidegger

139. “What is decision anyway?”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

141. “Because it is more essential, and older, the destiny of Being is less familiar than the lack of God.”

— Martin Heidegger

142. “No goal given to this humanity reaches what is essential. But the Americans take this state of nullity as the promise for their future, since they indeed nullify everything in the semblance of universal “happiness”. Americanism is the pinnacle of nihilism.”

— Martin Heidegger

143. “Thought has the gift of thinking back, a gift given because we incline toward it.”

— Martin Heidegger

144. “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

145. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

146. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

147. “From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The jug’s void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.”

— Martin Heidegger

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

— Martin Heidegger

149. “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.”

— Martin Heidegger

150. “All future interpretation of Greek metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s, is Christian.”

— Martin Heidegger