Martin Heidegger Quotes
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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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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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A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending.
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Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny ... does true order grow.
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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.
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Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are.
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I take great pleasure, every day, in seeing my work deeply rooted in our native soil.
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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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Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.
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This characteristic of Dasein's being this "that it is" is veiled in its "whence" and "whither.
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Nothing is everything that doesn't happen at this very moment.
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Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.
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The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.
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The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
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The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they must and should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things.
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So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.
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There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full.
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In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. The nature of art would then be this: the truth of being setting itself to work.
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We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.
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Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?
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Truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.
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We make a space inside ourselves, so that being can speak.
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The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.
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To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.