Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He is best known for his contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. These Martin Heidegger quotes will motivate you.
Best Martin Heidegger Quotes
- “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
- “We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “How one encounters reality is a choice.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can’t be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Nothing is everything that doesn’t happen at this very moment.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“We make a space inside ourselves so that being can speak.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “Transcendence constitutes selfhood.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“Questioning is the piety of thought.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably, it is not an arbitrary question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing”- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course, it is not the first question in the chronological sense […] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.” ~ Martin Heidegger quotes
- “We do not “have” a body; rather, we “are” bodily.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Spiritual superiority [consists in] deep dedication … in the form of the most rigorous training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “Being is only Being for Dasein.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Tell me how you read and I’ll tell you who you are.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “The possible ranks higher than the actual.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny … does true order grow.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “We name time when we say: everything 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. Everything has its time.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Celebration… is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder – the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“Truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “Only a god can save us.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “Technology is, therefore, no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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 the light – so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
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“In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “To dwell is to garden.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “The relationship between man and space is none other than a dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “True time is four-dimensional.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “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
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“In everything well-known something worthy of thought still lurks.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances, he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “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
- “But what is great can only begin great.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “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
- “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Body’, ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ may designate phenomenal domains which can be detached as themes for definite investigations; within certain limits, their ontological indefiniteness may not be important. When, however, we come to the question of man’s Being, this is not something we can simply compute by adding together those kinds of Being which body, soul, and spirit respectively possess–kinds of being whose nature has not as yet been determined. And even if we should attempt such an ontological procedure, some idea of the Being of the whole must be presupposed.” ~ Martin Heidegger
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“We would like only, for once, to get to where we are already.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.” ~ Martin Heidegger
- “I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.” ~ Martin Heidegger
