Heidegger Quotes

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”
― Richard M. Rorty

“For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.”
― Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom

“If anything in Kafka's theology can be called Jewish, it is his virtual lack of any concept of 'Nature'. There is in a sense no 'Nature' in Genesis either, since the world is created for man. There may, however, be more modern reasons for the absence of this concept in Kafka's case. His position here resembles that of Heidegger, whose Existential philosophy represents an attack on Naturalism (while adopting its atheistic presuppositions) and therefore finds no place for nature as such, but only for the world in so far as the world exists 'for human existence', i.e., as 'material'. Heidegger and Kafka are radically original in that aspect of their thought which does away with the natural and the supernatural at the same time. In Kafka the absence of Nature is due to the fact that for him what might be termed the 'institutionalization' of the world is total, indeed totalitarian. There is no room in it for that unoccupied and unused space beyond the sphere of human needs which we are in the habit of revering or enjoying as 'Nature'. Yet there is truth in Kafka's omission of Nature from his world, to the extent that the mechanized civilization of to-day may be described as appropriating and exploiting everything there is as raw material or fuel, and destroying whatever cannot be exploited—even human beings.”
― Günther Anders, Kafka pro und contra: Die Prozess-Unterlagen.

“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.”
― Heidegger, Martin

“The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is nothing. But man is, starting from his death. He ties himself tight to his death with a tie of which he is the judge. He makes his death; he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“It is not only temporality that is concealed although something like time always announces itself; even more well-known phenomena, like that of transcendence, the phenomena of world and being-in-the-world, are covered over. Nevertheless, they are not completely hidden, for the Dasein knows about something like ego and other. The concealment of transcendence is not a total unawareness but, what is much more fateful, a misunderstanding, a faulty interpretation. Faulty interpretations, misunderstandings, put much more stubborn obstacles in the way of authentic cognition than a total ignorance. However, these faulty interpretations of transcendence, of the basic relationship of Dasein to beings and to itself, are no mere defects of thought or acumen. They have their reason and their necessity in the Dasein's own historical existence. In the end, these faulty interpretations must be made, so that the Dasein may reach the path to the true phenomena by correcting them.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“Heidegger’s concept for the kind of being we ourselves are is Dasein. Literally it means ‘being-there’.We are the sort of beings who are there, in the world. What characterizes Dasein is that its existence is a concern for it in its existence.”
― Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom

“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, Basic Writings

“It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is replaced by a solipsism en deux in the I-thou relationship. As a relationship between Dasein and Dasein this has its possibility only on the basis of being-in-the-world. Put otherwise, being-in-the-world is with equal originality both being-with and being-among.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“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

“Within certain limits terminology is always arbitrary. But the definition of being-true as unveiling, making manifest, is not an arbitrary, private invention of mine; it only gives expression to the understanding of the phenomenon of truth, as the Greeks already understood it in a pre-scientific as well as philosophical understanding, even if not in every respect in an originally explicit way. Plato already says explicitly that the function of logos, of assertion, is deloun, making plain, or as Aristotle says more exactly with regard to the Greek expression of truth: aletheuein. Lanthanein means to be concealed: a- is the privative, so that a-letheuein is equivalent to: to pluck something out of its concealment, to make manifest or reveal. For the Greeks truth means: to take out of concealment, uncovering, unveiling.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“Only a God Can Save Us" (German: Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten)”
― Martin Heidegger

“Heidegger’s parlamblings on ‘Nothing’ and ‘Not’ and ‘the Nothing that Nothings’ were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy.”
― John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“Heidegger’s philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent.”
― William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

“Es un secreto a voces que los intelectuales de biblioteca y los hombres que se pasan la vida rodeados de palabras, de textos, pueden experimentar con especial intensidad las seducciones de las propuestas políticas violentas, particularmente cuando tal violencia no toca a su propia persona. En la sensibilidad y la visión del maestro carismático, del absolutista de la
filosofía, puede haber más que un simple toque de sadismo vicario (La lección, de Ionesco, es una macabra parábola de esto).”
― George Steiner, Heidegger

“Precisely because we have embarked on the great and long venture of demolishing a world that has grown old and of rebuilding it authentically anew, i.e. historically, we must know the tradition. We must know more—i.e. our knowledge must be stricter and more binding—than all the epochs before us, even the most revolutionary. Only the most radical historical knowledge can make us aware of our extraordinary tasks and preserve us from a new wave of mere restoration and uncreative imitation.”
― Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“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

“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, Introduction to Metaphysics

“Tatsächlich erinnert mich Stifter immer wieder an Heidegger, an diesen lächerlichen nationalsozialistischen Pumphosenspießer. Hat Stifter die hohe Literatur auf die unverschämteste Weise total verkitscht, so hat Heidegger, der Schwarzwaldphilosoph Heidegger, die Philosophie verkitscht, Heidegger und Stifter haben jeder für sich, auf seine Weise, die Philosophie und die Literatur heillos verkitscht. Heidegger, dem die Kriegs- und Nachkriegsgenerationen nachgelaufen sind und den sie mit widerwärtigen und stupiden Doktorarbeiten überhäuft haben schon zu Lebzeiten, sehe ich immer auf seiner Schwarzwaldhausbank sitzen neben seiner Frau, die ihm in ihrem perversen Strickenthusiasmus ununterbrochen Winterstrümpfe strickt mit der von ihr selbst von den eigenen Heideggerschafen heruntergeschorenen Wolle. Heidegger kann ich nicht anders sehen, als auf der Hausbank seines Schwarzwaldhauses, neben sich seine Frau, die ihn zeitlebens total beherrscht und die ihm alle Strümpfe gestrickt und alle Hauben gehäkelt hat und die ihm das Brot gebacken und das Bettzeug gewebt und die ihm selbst seine Sandalen geschustert hat.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy

“Being and Time begins by quoting a great philosophical authority not for his knowledge but for his perplexity, then tells us that we don’t understand the question, and demonstrates this by giving us the answer which means nothing to us at this point.”
― Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being

“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, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

“How many Germans "live" who speak their mother tongue effortlessly and yet are unable to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or one of Hölderlin's hymns! Hence whoever has mastered the Greek language, or has some acquaintance with it by accident or choice, possess not the least proof thereby that he is able to think according to the thought of a Greek thinker.”
― Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts

“Today, when philosophizing is so barbarous, so much like a St. Vitus' dance, as perhaps in no other period in the cultural history of the West, and when nevertheless the resurrection of metaphysics is hawked up and down all the streets, what Aristotle says in one of his most important investigations in the Metaphysics has been completely forgotten. Kai de kai to palai te kai nun kai aei zetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on, touto esti tis he ousia. "That which has been sought for from old and now and in the future and constantly, and that on which inquiry founders over and over again, is the problem What is being?" If philosophy is the science of being, then the first and last and basic problem of philosophy must be, What does being signify? Whence can something like being in general be understood? How is understanding of being at all possible?”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“All the propositions of ontology are Temporal propositions. Their truths unveil structures and possibilities of being in the light of Temporality. All ontological propositions have the character of Temporal truth, veritas temporalis.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“The past of authentic history indeed was, but it is by no means over and done with. It is not done with because it is not done with us. And because we are the historical beings that we are, we are not done with it.”
― George Joseph Seidel, Martin Heidegger and the Pre-Socratics: An Introduction to His Thought

“Every civil war builds on illusions and fear
Even war between individuals; whatever bonds may exist between them

To recapitulate images from history: After the first
world war, exhaustion, victory, inability to
build a new order, growing dissolution, chaos Revanchism Economic depression Then the waiting
for Germany, the generalized war initiated by Germany
This dread waiting, 1938, 1939 When I was conceived
After the cold war another period of exhaustion, another victory Perhaps we are in the presence of generalized
civil war, internal division, hatred Should we prefer
the empire? As Dante did? Or Ezra Pound, Heidegger Or
for that matter Brecht? We love dissolution and chaos passionately,
I hear a voice say, I know whose It is not here that I shall say it
It is not easy There are no nations Pillars of fire precede
the returning, in human terms, lost son.”
― Göran Sonnevi, Mozart's Third Brain

“From the Right, history appears as the history of Being, as the disclosure of an essential condition that carries its own immutable necessity. From the Left, history is the history of emancipation. It presents the capacity of humanity to choose and alter its condition. For the Right, the record of injustice yields an irreducible ground of suffering that must be affirmed as the essence of Being for humanity. For the Left, suffering is only that which waits to be turned aside when the advanced freedom brings humanity to the point where a choice can be upheld.”
― Marcus Paul Bullock, The Violent Eye: Ernst Junger's Visions and Revisions on the European Right