Martin Heidegger Quotes
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He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.
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Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.
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Nietzsche … does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.
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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.
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Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist.
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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.
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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.
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A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
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We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.
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The average, vague understanding of being can be permeated by traditional theories and opinions about being in such a way that these theories, as the sources of the prevailing understanding, remain hidden.
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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.
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But what is great can only begin great.
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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.
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We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil.
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In everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks.
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Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny ... does true order grow.
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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.
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Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.
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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.