Martin Heidegger

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

A boundary is not that at which something stops but that from which something begins.

We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.

Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.

To dwell is to garden.

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

Only a god can save us.

We name time when we say: every thing 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. Every thing has its time.

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.

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors.

Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

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.

Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

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.

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

Questioning is the piety of thought.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.

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.

The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

True time is four-dimensional.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.