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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 -
Since time itself is not movement, it must somehow have to do with movement.Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable, change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change? Does it here give itself as itself in what it is? Can an axplacation of time starts here guarantee that time will thereby provide as it were the fundamental phenomena that determine it in its own being?
Martin Heidegger
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Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not 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 -
Eternity, not as a static 'now,' nor as a sequence of 'nows' rolling off into the infinite, but as the 'now' that bends back into itself. … Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking being as time.
Martin Heidegger -
The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies....they tell us nothing about entities in their Being.
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 -
...der Wille zur »wahren Welt« im Sinne Platons und des Christentums … ist in Wahrheit ein Neinsagen zu unserer hiesigen Welt, in der gerade die Kunst heimisch ist.
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
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A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
Martin Heidegger -
Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.
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 -
Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.
Martin Heidegger -
He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.
Martin Heidegger -
We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.
Martin Heidegger
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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 -
Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.
Martin Heidegger -
But what is great can only begin great.
Martin Heidegger -
Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.
Martin Heidegger -
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 -
A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.
Martin Heidegger
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We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.
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 -
A man's first bond is that which ties him into the national community.
Martin Heidegger -
I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.
Martin Heidegger